Kenneth A. Froot

Harvard University | Harvard · Finance Unit

This paper demonstrates that value-relevant information about a firm appearing in regulatory disclosures of other firms is overlooked by investors. Firms highly mentioned in the 10-K competition section of other firms tend to outperform with risk-adjusted returns of up to 9% annually. Outperformance is concentrated in firms whose competition refere...

We develop real-time proxies of retail corporate sales from multiple sources, including ∼50 million mobile devices. These measures contain information from both the earnings quarter (“within quarter”) and the period between the quarter-end and the earnings announcement date (“post quarter”). Our within-quarter measure is powerful in explaining quar...

Greater financial integration and central bank policy initiatives in major developed markets have made cross-asset return correlations more important, highlighting the interest in broad measures of market-wide sentiment. Using an extensive array of institutional behavioral metrics across asset classes from State Street Associates, we find evidence...

Currency investors exhibit a tendency to cut risk by pairing both longs and shorts following losses and a weaker tendency to add risk following gains. By differentiating between position level, portfolio level and aggregate cross-portfolio losses in currency investments we demonstrate that this dynamic loss aversion spans multiple frames of referen...

The BlackRock Solutions case examines the different functions and economics of a global asset manager's value chain, with particular emphasis on the "money management" and the "investment systems platform" businesses. Students analyze why BlackRock decided to unbundle its Aladdin investment platform and if the firm should consider expanding the pla...

Currency investors exhibit a tendency to cut risk by pairing both longs and shorts following losses and a weaker tendency to add risk following gains. By differentiating between position-level, portfolio-level, and aggregate cross-portfolio losses in currency investments, the authors demonstrate that this dynamic loss aversion spans multiple frames...

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

This Paper explores the importance and price implications of style investing by institutional investors in the stock market. To analyze styles, we assign stocks to deciles or segments across three style dimensions: size, value/growth, and sector. we find strong evidence that institutional investors reallocate and sector. We find strong evidence tha...

SUBJECT AREAS: Capital costs, Financial instruments, Financial strategy, International finance, Base-of-the-pyramid markets, Emerging markets, Expansion, Assembly lines, Manufacturing. A well-performing Chinese manufacturer faces major impediments raising funding to grow. Highlights various imperfections that shape the financing decision.

Yet, in spite of these problems, the reinsurance market continues on. It doesn't appear to have been extinguished or even hindered by the unwillingness of insurers to cede their risks. Nevertheless, insurers rightly wish to know why it should be so expensive and rare to find reinsurers who are willing to take on extreme catastrophic risks. After al...

We model the equilibrium price and quantity of risk transfer between firms and financial intermediaries. Value-maximizing firms have downward sloping demands to cede risk, while intermediaries, who assume risk, provide less-than-fully-elastic supply. We show that equilibrium required returns will be “high” in the presence of financing imperfections...

Using a new technique, and weekly data for 25 countries from 1994 to 1998, we analyze the relationship between institutional cross-border portfolio flows, and domestic and foreign equity returns. In emerging markets, institutional flows forecast statistically indistinguishable movements in country closed-end fund NAV returns and price returns. In c...

This article builds on Froot and Stein in developing a framework for analyzing the risk allocation, capital budgeting, and capital structure decisions facing insurers and reinsurers. The model incorporates three key features: (i) value-maximizing insurers and reinsurers face product-market as well as capital-market imperfections that give rise to w...

We decompose currency returns into (permanent) intrinsic-value shocks and (transitory) expected-return shocks. We explore interactions between these shocks, currency returns, and institutional-investor currency flows. Intrinsic-value shocks are: dwarfed by expected-return shocks (yet currency returns overreact to them); unrelated to flows (although...

Investor confidence and risk tolerance are important concepts that investors are constantly trying to gauge. Yet these concepts are notoriously hard to measure in practice. Most attempts rely on price or return data, but these run into trouble when trying to disentangle whether an observed price change is attributable to a shift in investor confide...

Recent studies argue that the spread-adjusted Taylor rule (STR), which includes a response to the credit spread, replicates monetary policy in the United State. We show (1) STR is a theoretically optimal monetary policy under heterogeneous loan interest rate contracts in both discretionay and commitment monetary policies, (2) however, the optimal r...

Financial instruments whose payoffs are linked to exogenous events, such as the occurrence of a natural catastrophe or an unusual weather pattern depend crucially on actuarial models for determining event (e.g., default) probabilities. In many instances, investors appear to receive premiums far in excess of these modeled actuarial probabilities, ev...

We explore the interaction between exchange rates, institutional investor currency flows and exchange-rate fundamentals. We find that these flows are highly correlated with contemporaneous and lagged exchange rate changes, and that they carry information for future excess currency returns. This information, however, is not strongly linked to future...

The portfolio flows of institutional investors have been found to be highly persistent across countries and individual investment funds. This paper investigates the source of this persistence in emerging market equities. We employ the decomposition methodology in NBER Working Paper no. 9079 (July 2002), which decomposes the persistence of flows int...

The portfolio flows of institutional investors are widely known to be persistent. What is less well known, however, is the source of this persistence. One possibility is the ?informed trading hypothesis?: that persistence arises from autocorrelated trades of investors who believe they have information about value and who face an imperfectly liquid...

We show that trading causes excess comovement of stock returns. A simple model demonstrates that upon inclusion into (deletion from) the index, stocks should begin to co-move more (less) with the index, due to a change in their trading pattern. The empirical results provide sound support for these predictions: In a recent redefinition of the Nikkei...

Financial instruments whose payoffs are linked to exogenous events, such as the occurrence of a natural catastrophe or an unusual weather pattern depend crucially on actuarial models for determining event (e.g., default) probabilities. In many instances, investors appear to receive premiums far in excess of these modeled actuarial probabilities, ev...

This paper examines annual commodity price data from England and Holland over a span of seven centuries. Our data incorporates transaction prices on seven commodities: barley, butter, cheese, oats, peas, silver, and wheat, as well as pound/shilling nominal exchange rates going back, in some cases, to 1273. We find that the magnitude, volatility, an...

Matching university places to students is not as clear cut or as straightforward as it ought to be. By investigating the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions in medicine and related subjects, we show that a procedure designed to give an advantage to students with excellent school grades actually harm...

This paper explores daily international portfolio flows into and out of 44 countries from 1994 through 1998. We find several facts concerning the behavior of flows and their relationship with equity returns. First, we detect regional flow factors that have increased in importance through time. Second, the flows appear to be stationary, but far more...

The paper decomposes GDP both in terms of level per capita and growth rate, so as to identify the sources of income differences and of economic growth for all EU27 member states. This accounting approach has multiple advantages, although a number of substantial caveats should be borne in mind when interpreting the results. In particular, the detail...

In the last two years, the market for catastrophic event risk has witnessed important change. The first large and truly successful catastrophe (“CAT”) bonds have been issued. New exchanges have opened, traded contracts have been created, and indexes of CAT losses have been introduced. The array of products confronting issuers and investors has wide...

Returns on international equities are characterized by jumps leading to distributions that are skewed and have fat tails; moreover, these jumps in returns tend to occur at the same time across countries, and the likelihood of such jumps varies over time. To capture these stylized facts, we model returns using a multivariate system of jump-di#usion...

The 2008/9 financial crisis highlighted the importance of evaluating vulnerabilities owing to interconnectedness, or Too-Connected-to-Fail risk, among financial institutions for country monitoring, financial surveillance, investment analysis and risk management purposes. This paper illustrates the use of balance sheet-based network analysis to eval...

Is it possible that the insurance and reinsurance industries cannot handle a major catastrophe? Ten years ago, the notion that the overall cost of a single catastrophic event might exceed $10 billion was unthinkable. With ever increasing property-casualty risks and unabated growth in hazard-prone areas, insurers and reinsurers now envision the poss...

This paper explores the behavior of daily, international portfolio flows into and out of 46 countries from 1994 through 1998. Our data are from State Street Bank & Trust and encompass over 3 million trades by client institutions. We find a number of interesting facts. First, we detect regional factors within the flows. Second, the flows are strongl...

The classic approach to capital budgeting based on the standard Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) says that the hurdle rate (or cost of capital) for any new project or investment should depend only on the riskiness of that investment. Thus, the hurdle rate, and hence the expected value of the investment, should not be affected by the financial pol...

: We develop a framework for analyzing the capital allocation and capital structure decisions facing financial institutions such as banks. Our model incorporates two key features: i) value-maximizing banks have a well-founded concern with risk management; and ii) not all the risks they face can be frictionlessly hedged in the capital market. This a...

Leading financial scholars present essays examining the performance of the basic financial functions underlying global financial systems: payments, lending and investing, pooling funds, allocating risk, providing information, and dealing with incentive issues - with particular emphasis on how their performance is changing and implications for the f...

We explore two theories that have been advanced to explain the patterns in U.S. catastrophe reinsurance pricing. The first is that price variation is tied to demand shocks, driven in effect by changes in actuarially expected losses. The second holds that the supply of capital to the reinsurance industry is less than perfectly elastic, with the cons...

This paper argues that the financial exposure of households and firms to natural catastrophe disasters is borne primarily by insurance companies. Surprisingly, insurers use reinsurance to cover only a small fraction of these exposures, yet many insurers do not have enough capital and surplus to survive medium or large disasters. In a well-functioni...

This paper reviews the large and growing literature which tests PPP and other models of the long-run real exchange rate. We distinguish three different stages of PPP testing and focus on what has been learned from each. The most important overall lesson has been that the real exchange rate appears stationary over sufficiently long horizons. Simple,...

This paper examines the impact of the 1986 change in U.S. interest allocation rules on the investment and financing decisions of American multinationals. The 1986 change reduced the tax deductibility of the interest expenses of firms with excess foreign tax credits. The resulting increase in the cost of debt gives firms incentives to substitute awa...

We document a large decrease in autocorrelation and increase in variance of recent short-run returns on several broad stock market indexes, over the 1983-89 period, 15-minute returns went from being highly positively serially correlated to practically uncorrelated. Over the past twenty years, daily and weekly autocorrelations have also fallen, we u...

The author examines how closely correlated a variety of real assets are with inflation, as well as how effectively they help insure major financial asset classes against adverse shocks. The author examines how real assets - including real estate, commodities, and commodity-linked equities - might be combined in a portfolio. The evidence indicates t...

We test the mean-variance efficiency (MVE) hypothesis using a method that allows conditional expected returns to vary in relatively unrestricted ways. The method takes advantage of the predictability of conditional variances. The data estimate reasonably the price of risk, and the MVE model is valuable in explaining expected equity returns. Neverth...

When communism fell in 1989, the question for most Eastern European countries was not whether to go to a market economy, but how to get there. Several years later, the difficult process of privatization and restructuring continues to concern the countries of the region. The Transition in Eastern Europe, Volumes 1 and 2 is an analysis of the experie...

When communism fell in 1989, the question for most Eastern European countries was not whether to go to a market economy, but how to get there. Several years later, the difficult process of privatization and restructuring continues to concern the countries of the region. The Transition in Eastern Europe, Volumes 1 and 2 is an analysis of the experie...

This paper studies the international experience with securities transaction taxes (STTs), using the Swedish and British systems as case studies. We argue that STTs are best thought of as taxes on different resources used in transactions: domestic brokerage services in the case of Sweden, and registration services in the British case. STTs give inve...

We apply the method of constrained asset share estimation (CASE) to test the mean-variance efficiency (MVE) of the stock market. This method allows conditional expected returns to vary in relatively unrestricted ways. The data estimate reasonably the price of risk, and, in some cases, the MVE model is valuable in explaining expected equity returns....

This paper develops a general framework for analyzing corporate risk management policies. We begin by observing that if external sources of finance are more costly to corporations than internally generated funds, there will typically be a benefit to hedging: hedging adds value to the extent that it helps ensure that a corporation has sufficient int...

Over the past decade, foreign direct investment (FDI) around the world has nearly tripled, and with this surge have come dramatic shifts in FDI flows. In Foreign Direct Investment, distinguished economists look at changes in FDI, including historical trends, specific country experiences, developments in the semiconductor industry, and variations in...

The US economy is arguably following an unsustainable trajectory. The main indicators of this are a large current account deficit, a large federal budget deficit and trend-wise increasing costs of Social Security and Medicare. In this chapter, we will discuss these observations and to what extent the financial and economic crisis may have changed t...

Standard models of informed speculation suggest that traders try to learn information that others do not have. This result implicitly relies on the assumption that speculators have long horizons, i.e., can hold the asset forever. By contrast, the authors show that if speculators have short horizons, they may herd on the same information, trying to...

The careening path of the dollar in recent years has shattered more than historical records and the financial health of some speculators. It has also helped to shatter faith in economists' models of the determination of exchange rates. We have understood for some time that under conditions of high international capital mobility, currency values wil...

Japan's outflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) have increased dramatically in recent years, to the point where Japan has become the world's largest overseas direct investor. This paper documents the increase in Japanese FDI, as well as its breakdown across industries and countries. Investments in real estate and financial services have grown m...

When central banks are about to relinquish control over their exchange rate and enter into a currency union, the reptutational costs to devaluation are very low. As with any finite-horizon game, the endpoint affects the earlier expectations of private agents, here causing them to demand higher interest rates and higher wages from countries whose cu...

The paper presents new empirical results that elucidate the dynamics of the foreign exchange market. The first half of the paper is an updated study of the exchange rate expectations held by market participants, as reflected in responses to surveys, and contains the following conclusions. First, the bias observed in the forward discount as a predic...

We investigate how shareholder trading practices might be linked to corporate investment horizons. We examine two possible linkages and analyze a range of data relevant to them. The first is excess volatility, which occurs when stock prices react not only to news about economic fundamentals, but also to trades based on non-fundamental factors. Exce...

Simple techniques of regulated Brownian motion are used to analyze the behavior of the exchange rate when official policy reaction functions are subject to future stochastic changes. We examine exchange-rate dynamics in cases where the authorities promise (i) to confine a floating rate within a predetermined range, (ii) to peg the currency once it...

The authors examine the connection between exchange rates and foreign direct investment that arises when globally integrated capital markets are subjected to informational imperfections. These imperfections cause external financing to be more expensive than internal financing, so that changes in wealth translate into changes in the demand for direc...

When changes in the economic policy regime occur stochastically, asset prices will reflect the possibility of such shifts. In this paper we apply techniques of regulated Brownian motion to obtain closed-form analytic price solutions when policy reaction functions are subject to prospective changes. We focus on the case in which the authorities prom...

The World Bank, the IMF, and Japan have provided funds for debt reduction programs. There is some confusion, however, about how such programs work and about whether debtors and their creditors can expect to gain from any of them. This paper provides a review and consolidation of what economists understand about market-based schemes and debt restruc...

Several puzzling aspects of the behavior of United States stock prices may be explained by the presence of a specific type of rational bubble that depends exclusively on aggregate dividends. The authors call bubbles of this type "intrinsic" bubbles because they derive all of their variability from exogenous economic fundamentals and none from extra...

The paper presents new empirical results that elucidate the dynamics of the foreign exchange market. The first half of the paper is an updated study of the exchange rate expectations held by market participants, as reflected in responses to surveys, and contains the following conclusions. First, the bias observed in the forward discount as a predic...

most (all?) behavior can be explained by assuming that agents have stable, well-defined preferences and make rational choices consistent with those preferences in markets that (eventually) clear. An empirical result qualifies as an anomaly if it is difficult to "rationalize," or if implausible assumptions are necessary to explain it within the para...

This paper examines whether short-term exchange rate expectations ‘overreact’ by comparing them with long-term expectations. We develop a set of nonlinear restrictions linking expectations at different forecast horizons. The restrictions impose consistency, a property weaker than rationality. We use exchange rate survey data to measure expectations...

The overshooting theory of exchange rates seems ideally designed to explain some important aspects of the movement of the dollar in recent years. Over the period 1981-84, for example, when real interest rates in the United States rose above those of its trading partners (presumably due to shifts in the monetary/fiscal policy mix), the dollar apprec...

This paper provides a simple method to account for heteroskesdasticity and cross-sectional dependence in samples with large cross sections and relatively few time series observations. The estimators we derive are motivated by cross-sectional regression studies in finance and accounting. Simulation evidence suggests that the estimators are dependabl...

Changes in variance, or volatility, over time can be modeled using the approach based on autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity. Another approach is to model variance as an unobserved stochastic process. Although it is not easy to obtain the exact likelihood function for such stochastic variance models, they tie in closely with developments...

Survey data on exchange rate expectations are used to divide the forward discount into expected depreciation and a risk premium. Our starting point is the common test oh whether the forward discount is an unbiased predictor of future changes in the spot rate. We use the surveys to decompose the bias into a protion attributable to the risk premium a...

We apply the method of constrained asset share estimation (CASE) to test the mean-variance efficiency (MVE) of the stock market. This method allows conditional expected returns to vary in unrestricted ways, given investor preferences. We also allow conditional variances to follow an ARCH process. The data estimate reasonably the coefficient of rela...

A common finding is that the forward discount is a biased predictor of future exchange rate changes. We use survey data on exchange rate expectations to decompose the bias into portions attributable to the risk premium and expectational errors. None of the bias in our sample reflects the risk premium. We also reject the claim that the risk premium...

The authors investigate the pass-through from exchange rates to import prices when firms' future demands depend on their current market shares. They show that profit-maximizing foreign firms may either raise or lower their dollar export prices when the dollar appreciates temporarily (i.e., the pass-through may be perverse) and that current import p...

Survey data on interest-rate expectations permit separate testing of the two alternative hypotheses in traditional term structure tests: that the expectations hypothesis fails, and that expected future interest rates are ex post inefficient forecasts. The author finds that the source of the spread's poor predictions of future interest rates varies...

The authors compare different indexation schemes in terms of their ability to facilitate forgiveness and reduce the investment disincentives associated with the large LDC debt overhang. Indexing to an endogenous variable (e.g., a country's output) has a negative moral hazard effect on investment. This problem does not arise when payments are linked...

Comparamos programas para el alivio de la deuda basados en el mercado, con un perdón coordinado de la deuda por parte de los acreedores. Los deudores obtienen beneficios de esos programas en la medida en que los pagos esperados se reducen, pero pierden en la medida en que sacrifican recursos corrientes. Los acreedores se benefician cuando los recur...

The author compares forms of market-based debt relief with coordinated debt forgiveness on the part of creditors. Debtors benefit from these schemes to the extent that expected payments fall, but lose to the extent that they sacrifice current resources. Creditors' benefit when the buyback resources are "additional," and when debt reduction creates...

Copulae provide investors with tools to model the dependency structure among financial products. The choice of copulae plays an important role in successful copula applications. However, selecting copulae usually relies on general goodness-of-fit (GoF) tests which are independent of the particular financial problem. This paper �rst proposes a pair-...

This paper investigates the effects of imperfectly credible trade liberalization programs on welfare and the allocation of real resources. We present a rational expectations model in which a government, with limited access to international financial markets may be forced to abort a liberalization program if hard-currency reserves are depleted too q...

Several recent developments have inspired us to consider a non-standard model of the dollar as a speculative bubble without the constraint of fully rational expectations: (1) the dollar continued to rise in 1984 after real interest rate differentials and other fundamentals began moving the wrong way; (2) the results of market efficiency tests imply...

Simple regression tests that have power against the alternatives that. asset prices and expected future asset returns are excessively volatile are developed and performed for the foreign exchange and stock markets. These tests have a number of advantages over alternative, variance hounds techniques. We find evidence that. both exchange rates and st...

Three surveys of exchange rate expectations allow us to measure directly the expected rates of return on yen versus dollars. Expectations of yen appreciation against the dollar have been (1) consistently large, (2) variable, and (3) greater than the forward premium, implying that investors were willing to accept a lower expected return on dollar as...

We introduce adaptive learning behavior into a general-equilibrium life-cycle economy with capital accumulation. Agents form forecasts of the rate of return to capital assets using least-squares autoregressions on past data. We show that, in contrast to the perfect-foresight dynamics, the dynamical system under learning possesses equilibria that ar...