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Ubiquitous Comovement
... [ common fundamental factor as in Grieser, Lee, and Zekhnini (2020), leading to return predictability. Specifically, firms with neighboring codes may share similar fundamentals due to their potentially similar listing time. ...
Exploiting a screen display feature whereby the order of stock display is determined by the stock's listing code, we lever a novel identification strategy and study how the interaction between overconfidence and limited attention affect asset pricing. We find that stocks displayed next to those with higher returns in the past two weeks are associated with higher returns in the future week, which are reverted in the long run. This is consistent with our conjectures that investors tend to trade more after positive investment experience and are more likely to pay attention to neighboring stocks, both confirmed using trading data.
We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing, in which shocks to the value of collateralizable assets generate variation in firms’ debt capacity. We show that the degree of similarity among firms’ financial flexibility forecasts cross-sectional variation in return correlation. We test the implications of the model with firm-level data in two empirical analyses using i) an instrumental variable approach based on shocks to the value of collateralizable corporate assets and ii) the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis as an event study. We find that firms in the same percentile of the cross-sectional distribution of financial flexibility have 62% higher correlation in stock-return residuals than firms 50 percentiles apart.
Leverage-initiating stocks experience an increase in return comovement with leveraged stocks and a decrease in return comovement with zero-leverage stocks in the year after the leverage initiation event. Conversely, stocks that fully deleverage comove more with their new peers of zero-leverage stocks and less with their old peers of leveraged stocks. These findings are robust after controlling for common factors and firm characteristics and using various time series and events as exogenous shocks to corporate leverage decisions. Our findings can be explained by investor clienteles for financial leverage and are not driven by omitted variables and other characteristic-induced comovements.
We study investor communication and stock comovement using a novel dataset from an active online stock forum in China. We find substantial comovement among the returns of a stock and its “related stocks,” which are frequently discussed in the sub‐forum dedicated to the given stock. Comovement is greater when the discussion of related stocks is more intensive. Further, the effect of communication on comovement is stronger for stocks associated with higher information uncertainty. Co‐discussed stocks are more actively traded and experience more correlated trading. A trading strategy that exploits communication‐driven comovement generates abnormal returns. Our findings highlight the impact of investor communication on asset comovement.
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Purpose
Local investors have the ability to impact the stock prices and returns of local firms. However, the impact of news made by a firm on local investors and neighboring companies is absent from the academic literature. The purpose of this paper is to fill that void and examine how a local investor clientele affects the stock market reactions of firms located within the same geographic proximity as a news-generating firm.
Design/methodology/approach
After accounting for firm, industry, and geographic characteristics, this study examines how a firm’s dividend initiation announcement (positive news) influences stock prices of seemingly unrelated firms within the same metropolitan statistical area (MSA).
Findings
Dividend-paying firms located in areas with a higher percentage of dividend clientele experience a positive comovement reaction when a seemingly unrelated firm within the same MSA announces a dividend initiation. The positive reactions are specifically for dividend-paying firms, while non-dividend payers exhibit no significant response. These results are robust to numerous regression methods and alternative explanations.
Practical implications
These findings are consistent with the positive-investor-attention hypothesis, suggesting positive spillover effects from news announcements for other local firms in the presence of individual investor clientele.
Originality/value
This is the first study to link how news generated by one firm can influence other geographically local firms, providing evidence on the impact of individual investor clientele on stock returns of local non-news firms.
I introduce a method for gauging the qualitative similarity of firm-specific information based on linguistic commonality in newswire text. I show that this new qualitative similarity measure predicts future cross-firm return correlation even after accounting for the pair's contemporaneous price comovement, common exposures to systematic risk, firm liquidity, price, index membership, text volume, headquarters location, product similarity, shared mutual fund or institutional ownership, common analyst following and newswire co-mentions. I also demonstrate that content produced solely by journalists cannot predict an economically meaningful portion of future comovement. Out-of-sample tests confirm that knowledge of qualitative similarity can also reduce portfolio risk.
We test whether model misspecification or liquidity spirals primarily explain the observed excess dependence in filtered (for economic fundamentals) hedge fund index returns and the links between volatility, liquidity shocks, and hedge fund return clustering. Evidence supports the model misspecification hypothesis: i) hedge fund filtered return clustering is symmetric, ii) filtered Short Bias fund returns exhibit negative dependence with filtered returns for other hedge fund types, iii) negative liquidity shocks are associated with clustering in both tails and market volatility subsumes the role of negative liquidity shocks, and iv) these same patterns appear in size-sorted equity portfolios.
We document strong comovement in the returns of hedge funds sharing the same prime broker. This comovement is driven neither by funds in the same family nor in the same style, and it is distinct from market-wide and local comovement. The common information hypothesis attributes this phenomenon to the prime broker providing valuable information to its hedge fund clients. The prime broker-level contagion hypothesis attributes the comovement to the prime broker spreading funding liquidity shocks across its hedge fund clients. We find strong evidence supporting the common information hypothesis, but limited evidence in favor of the prime broker-level contagion hypothesis.
Received September 6, 2014; accepted January 7, 2016 by Editor Philip Strahan.
Evidence of excessive comovement among stocks following index additions (Barberis, Shleifer, and Wurgler, 2005) and stock splits (Green and Hwang, 2009) challenges traditional finance theory. We show that the bivariate regressions in this literature provide little information about the economic magnitude of excess comovement, with coefficients that are sensitive to unrelated factors. Using robust univariate regressions and matched control samples, almost all evidence of excess comovement disappears. In both examples, the stocks exhibit strong returns prior to the event, akin to momentum winners. We document that winner stocks exhibit increases in betas, generating much of the apparent excess comovement.
This article develops and applies new measures of portfolio performance which use benchmarks based on the characteristics of stocks held by the portfolios that are evaluated. Specifically, the benchmarks are constructed from the returns of 125 passive portfolios that are matched with stocks held in the evaluated portfolio on the basis of the market capitalization, book‐to‐market, and prior‐year return characteristics of those stocks. Based on these benchmarks, “Characteristic Timing” and “Characteristic Selectivity” measures are developed that detect, respectively, whether portfolio managers successfully time their portfolio weightings on these characteristics and whether managers can select stocks that outperform the average stock having the same characteristics. We apply these measures to a new database of mutual fund holdings covering over 2500 equity funds from 1975 to 1994. Our results show that mutual funds, particularly aggressive‐growth funds, exhibit some selectivity ability, but that funds exhibit no characteristic timing ability.
By connecting stocks through common active mutual fund ownership, we forecast cross-sectional variation in return covariance, controlling for similarity in style (in-dustry, size, value, and momentum), the extent of common analyst coverage, and other pair characteristics. We argue this covariance is due to contagion based on re-turn decomposition evidence, cross-sectional heterogeneity in the extent of the e¤ect, and the magnitude of average abnormal returns to a cross-stock reversal trading strat-egy exploiting information in these connections. We show that the typical long/short hedge fund covaries negatively with this strategy suggesting that hedge funds may potentially exacerbate the price dislocation we document.
Investor bias in favor of geographically close firms has been documented in previous papers. An implication of this bias is that, if local events cause nearby investors to trade together, then the correlation of stock returns of pairs of firms will increase as the distance between them decreases. We test this hypothesis using a sample of Standard & Poors 500 (S&P) companies. After adjusting for industry effects and other factors, we find that the cor-relation coefficient between two stocks increases by 12 basis points for every 100 mile reduction in distance. This result is consistent with local shocks affecting the returns of nearby firms by an average of approximately 43 basis points per month. We conclude that these shocks are most likely the result of trading activity by local investors who own shares in nearby firms.
Discount rate variation is the central organizing question of current asset pricing research. I survey facts, theories and applications. We thought returns were uncorrelated over time, so variation in price-dividend ratios was due to variation in expected cashflows. Now it seems all price-dividend variation corresponds to discount-rate variation. We thought that the cross-section of expected returns came from the CAPM. Now we have a zoo of new factors. I categorize discount-rate theories based on central ingredients and data sources. Discount-rate variation continues to change finance applications, including portfolio theory, accounting, cost of capital, capital structure, compensation, and macroeconomics.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
Building on Vijh (Rev. Financial Stud. 7 (1994)), we use additions to the S&P 500 to distinguish two views of return comovement: the traditional view, which attributes it to comovement in news about fundamental value, and an alternative view, in which frictions or sentiment delink it from fundamentals. After inclusion, a stock's beta with the S&P goes up. In bivariate regressions which control for the return of non-S&P stocks, the increase in S&P beta is even larger. These results are generally stronger in more recent data. Our findings cannot easily be explained by the fundamentals-based view and provide new evidence in support of the alternative friction- or sentiment-based view.
Examines the arbitrage model of capital asset pricing as an alternative to the mean variance capital asset pricing model introduced by Sharpe, Lintner and Treynor. Overview of the arbitrage theory; Role of the arbitrage model in explaining phenomena observed in capital markets for risky assets; Influence of the presence of noise on the pricing relation. (Из Ebsco)
This essay examines what volatility tests tell us about the data and what implications we should derive from them. It argues that volatility tests do not tell us that "prices are too volatile", implying that "markets are inefficient", but rather that "(discounted) returns are forecastable", implying that "current discount rate models leave a residual". It also argues that the discount rate residuals documented by volatility tests (and equivalent return forecasting regressions or Euler equation tests) are suggestive of rational, business cycle-induced discount rate movements, rather than "fads" or other inefficiencies.
Using a sample free of survivor bias, the author demonstrates that common factors in stock returns and investment expenses almost completely explain persistence in equity mutual funds' mean and risk-adjusted returns. Darryll Hendricks, Jayendu Patel, and Richard Zeckhauser's (1993) 'hot hands' result is mostly driven by the one-year momentum effect of Narasimham Jegadeesh and Sheridan Titman (1993), but individual funds do not earn higher returns from following the momentum strategy in stocks. The only significant persistence not explained is concentrated in strong underperformance by the worst-return mutual funds. The results do not support the existence of skilled or informed mutual fund portfolio managers. Copyright 1997 by American Finance Association.