Search Results
Working Paper
Momentum Trading, Return Chasing and Predictable Crashes
We combine self-collected historical data from 1867 to 1907 with CRSP data from 1926 to 2012, to examine the risk and return over the past 140 years of one of the most popular mechanical trading strategies ? momentum. We find that momentum has earned abnormally high risk-adjusted returns ?a three factor alpha of 1 percent per month between 1927 and 2012 and 0.5 percent per month between 1867 and 1907 ? both statistically significantly different from zero. However, the momentum strategy also exposed investors to large losses (crashes) during both periods. Momentum crashes were predictable ? ...
Discussion Paper
Implications of security market data for models of dynamic economies
We show how to use security market data to restrict the admissible region for means and standard deviations of intertemporal marginal rates of substitution (IMRSs) of consumers. Our approach is (i) nonparametric and applies to a rich class of models of dynamic economies; (ii) characterizes the duality between the mean-standard deviation frontier for IMRSs and the familiar mean-standard deviation frontier for asset returns; and (iii) exploits the restriction that IMRSs are positive random variables. The region provides a convenient summary of the sense in which asset market data are anomalous ...
Discussion Paper
Ex-day behavior of Japanese stock prices: new insights from new methodology
We study the ex-dividend day behavior of Japanese stock prices for the period 198387. We find that, contrary to previous findings, prices of ex-day stocks drop by nearly the full amount of the dividend. However, ex-day stocks shows an abnormal return. Also, for the many ex-dividend day stocks that also go ex-rights on the same ex-day, we find that the return is on average higher than that for stocks without rights issues. We thus conclude that the ex-day behavior of Japanese stocks are qualitatively similar to that of U.S. stocks.
Discussion Paper
Relationship between labor-income risk and average return: empirical evidence from the Japanese stock market
In Japan, as in the United States, stocks that are more sensitive to changes in the monthly growth rate of labor income earn a higher return on average. Whereas the stock-index beta can only explain 2 percent of the cross-sectional variation in the average return on stock portfolios, the stock-index beta and the labor-beta together explain 75 percent of the variation. We find that the labor-beta drives out the size effect but not the book-to-market-price effect that is documented in the literature. We explore the extent to which these results are an artifact of seasonal patterns in ...
Journal Article
Why should older people invest less in stock than younger people?
Financial planners typically advise people to shift investments away from stocks and toward bonds as they age. The planners commonly justify this advice in three ways. They argue that stocks are less risky over a young person?s long investment horizon, that stocks are often necessary for young people to meet large financial obligations (like college tuition for their children), and that younger people have more years of labor income ahead with which to recover from the potential losses associated with stock ownership. This article uses economic reasoning to evaluate these three different ...
Journal Article
The CAPM debate
This article describes the academic debate about the usefulness of the capital asset pricing model (the CAPM) developed by Sharpe and Lintner. First the article describes the data the model is meant to explain?the historical average returns for various types of assets over long time periods. Then the article develops a version of the CAPM and describes how it measures the risk of investing in particular assets. Finally the article describes the results of competing studies of the model's validity. Included are studies that support the CAPM (Black; Black, Jensen, and Scholes; Fama and ...
Journal Article
The simple analytics of commodity futures markets: do they stabilize prices? Do they raise welfare?
This paper uses a simple, graphical approach to analyze what happens to commodity prices and economic welfare when futures markets are introduced into an economy. It concludes that these markets do not necessarily make prices more or less stable. It also concludes that, contrary to common belief, whatever happens to commodity prices is not necessarily related to what happens to the economic welfare of market participants: even when futures markets reduce the volatility of prices, some people can be made worse off. These conclusions come from a series of models that differ in their assumptions ...
Journal Article
The declining U.S. equity premium
This study demonstrates that the U.S. equity premium has declined significantly during the last three decades. The study calculates the equity premium using a variation of a formula in the classic Gordon stock valuation model. The calculation includes the bond yield, the stock dividend yield, and the expected dividend growth rate, which in this formulation can change over time. The study calculates the premium for several measures of the aggregate U.S. stock portfolio and several assumptions about bond yields and stock dividends and gets basically the same result. The premium averaged about 7 ...
Report
Seasonalities in security returns: the case of earnings announcements
An examination of the behavior of stock returns around quarterly earnings announcement dates finds a seasonal pattern: small firms show large positive abnormal returns and a sizable increase in the variability of returns around these dates. Only part of the large abnormal returns can be accounted for by the fact that firms with good news tend to announce early. Large firms show no abnormal returns around announcement dates and a much smaller increase in variability.
Report
Why do stock prices drop by less than the value of the dividend? Evidence from a country without taxes
It is well documented that on average, stock prices drop by less than the value of the dividend on ex-dividend days. This has commonly been attributed to the effect of tax clienteles. We use data from the Hong Kong stock market where neither dividends nor capital gains are taxed. As in the U.S.A. the average stock price drop is less than the value of the dividend; specifically, in Hong Kong the average dividend was HK $0.12 and the average price drop was HK $0.06. We are able to account for this both theoretically and empirically through market microstructure based arguments.