Knowledge that Transforms

This study investigates the relationship between the culture of secrecy and stock price comovement using a large sample of firms in 49 countries over the period 1990 to 2019. We find that stock prices in secretive societies comove more than stock prices in less secretive societies. This higher comovement occurs primarily because idiosyncratic volatility is lower. We attribute this finding to cultural biases in secretive societies which deter investors’ information-seeking behavior. To support these conjectures, we provide evidence of stronger mean reversals (less informed trading) in these societies. Our results persist when we account for cross-country differences in firms’ liquidity and information asymmetry, and when we control for cash flow uncertainty. Finally, the enforcement of insider trading laws in secretive countries is associated with less privately informed trading and lower idiosyncratic volatility.

This paper utilizes receipt lotteries in Taiwan, along with comprehensive administrative data, to examine the effect of cash windfalls on stock market participation and portfolio diversification, which can help us understand whether wealth levels serve as the explanation for the limited participation and under-diversification puzzles in stock markets. The results indicate that each million TWD (approximately 33,000 USD) windfall gain from winning receipt lotteries increases the probability of stock market participation by 1.09 percentage points. This effect is primarily driven by individuals who were not participating in the stock market prior to winning. For existing participants, each million TWD windfall increases the total value of stocks by 142,552 TWD, attributed to both an increase in their number of shares and higher average prices of the stocks they hold. Additionally, we find that individuals do not significantly diversify their portfolios after winning the lottery, suggesting that wealth level is not the primary reason for under-diversification.

We study the dynamics of the short-duration premium around pre-scheduled news announcements. For macroeconomic news, long-duration stocks earn higher returns than short-duration stocks. On the flip side, returns for short-duration stocks are significantly elevated on earnings announcement days. Focusing on earnings announcement as a laboratory for the pricing of firm-specific news, we differentiate between four competing explanations. We find strong support for the idea that investors are overly optimistic about long-term cash-flows, leading to an overvaluation of long-duration stocks. This overvaluation is in part corrected at earnings announcements, explaining the lower return response of long- compared to short-duration stocks. We also present empirical evidence against the three competing explanations, and show that the effect is not present in the corporate bond market.

This paper examines the issue of optimal currency allocation for an international investor who is both risk- and ambiguity-averse. Utilizing a robust mean–variance model that incorporates smooth ambiguity preferences, we derive a closed-form solution for the optimal currency exposure. Within this theoretical framework, the demand for optimal currency hedging is formulated as the solution to a generalized ridge regression. Our findings indicate that the investor’s aversion to model uncertainty increases the demand for hedging. The empirical analysis illustrates that ambiguity introduces greater estimation bias and narrows the confidence interval of the optimal currency exposure estimator. An out-of-sample backtest further demonstrates that incorporating ambiguity into the model improves the stability of optimal currency allocation over time and significantly reduces portfolio volatility after accounting for transaction costs.

We study the impact of political relations on media coverage. Using a sample of 3,290 American Depository Receipts (ADRs) from 45 countries, we find that deteriorating political relations between the US and an ADR firm's home country induce negative coverage by the US media of the ADR firm. To alleviate endogeneity, we adopt France's and Germany's opposition to the Iraq War and the inauguration of the US president as two shocks to bilateral political relations between the US and foreign countries. In placebo tests, we show no negative effect of political relations on ADR firms’ press releases or non-US media coverage. We further document the three economic mechanisms underlying the impact of political relations on media coverage: US journalists’ country sentiment, a country's popularity among US readers, and the US media's political beliefs. Finally, we document two consequences of negative coverage by the US media: investors respond less to negative news of firms from countries with deteriorating political relations with the US, and negative coverage leads to a greater likelihood of firms terminating their ADRs.

Using a worldwide sample of 3250 global equity funds, we provide out-of-sample evidence of active share as a strong return predictor. However, a global fund’s within-region active share predicts superior performance in Europe and Asia-Pacific, but not in the United States. We reconcile this difference by showing that highly active global managers (whether based in the U.S. or elsewhere) have outperformed both in U.S. and international markets primarily when they are also betting on equity anomalies. The weak return predictability of active share alone in the U.S. stems from domestic anomalies and is not generalizable to global markets.

We show that firms’ left-tail risk positively predicts future returns of crash insurance. We proxy crash insurance with bear spreads, an option trading strategy that profits when extreme negative returns occur. Crash insurance for high (low) left-tail risk firms earns positive (negative) returns, suggesting that the downside protection it provides is not adequately priced. Our results are mainly explained by two types of underreaction: volatility underreaction in high left-tail risk portfolios and underreaction to the persistence of left-tail risk. Disagreement partially explains our results, but a risk-based approach does not.

Using a large international sample of firms, we examine the relation between carbon management ability (CMA) and firm-level climate risk exposure. We find that CMA is negatively associated with climate risk exposure. More importantly, we show that firms with high-CMA managers tend to achieve a reduction in climate risk exposure through enhancing regulatory compliance (evidenced by fewer stakeholder rights violations), reducing environmental, social, and governance-related controversies, investing in research and development, undertaking more investment in environmental initiatives, and cultivating a favorable corporate culture. Cross-sectional analyses indicate that the negative association between CMA and climate risk exposure is stronger for firms in carbon-intensive sectors and firms with a dedicated corporate sustainability committee. Further, we reveal that CMA exerts a greater influence on climate risk exposure in stakeholder-oriented countries and in countries that have signed the Paris Agreement. Finally, we reveal that firms with high-CMA managers tend to have better financial performance. Overall, our findings indicate that CMA plays a crucial role in driving firms towards more sustainable and responsible business practices, leading to better corporate performance and enhanced corporate reputation.

Systematic biases in return expectations can distort stock prices and lead to inefficient capital allocation. In this paper, we report experimental evidence that buying a stock induces optimistically biased expectations when its price drops below the purchase price. We find this effect across two experimental settings, a controlled laboratory experiment and a six-week-long online experiment involving real equities traded in the stock market in real time. Our results are consistent with the idea that investors form “motivated beliefs” about stocks returns. In addition, motivated beliefs explain a substantial part of the reluctance to sell losing stocks, as in the well-known disposition effect.

We introduce two novel indices built from CDS market data capturing the level and uncertainty information embedded in credit spreads aggregated by industry, and study their role in predicting bonds recovery rates. Analyzing 613 defaulted U.S. corporate bond issues from 2006 to 2019 and using a beta regression model, we find the cross-sectional mean and approximate entropy of CDS spreads aggregated at the sector level to be important predictors of the recovery rates distributions. In the classical beta regression model, both regressors are statistically significant and enhance the pseudo-R2 by up to 4%. Notably, a forward model selection procedure includes the sector-level regressor before well-known variables such as the bonds’ coupon rate or the American default rate. In addition, our sector-uncertainty regressor is the only significant uncertainty variable. These findings offer valuable insights for improving credit risk assessment methodologies and identifying key risk indicators of recovery rates before running prediction models.