The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.
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The World Price of Covariance Risk
Published: 03/01/1991 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1991.tb03747.x
CAMPBELL R. HARVEY
In a financially integrated global market, the conditionally expected return on a portfolio of securities from a particular country is determined by the country's world risk exposure. This paper measures the conditional risk of 17 countries. The reward per unit of risk is the world price of covariance risk. Although the tests provide evidence on the conditional mean variance efficiency of the benchmark portfolio, the results show that countries' risk exposures help explain differences in performance. Evidence is also presented which indicates that these risk exposures change through time and that the world price of covariance risk is not constant.
Time‐Varying World Market Integration
Published: 06/01/1995 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1995.tb04790.x
GEERT BEKAERT, CAMPBELL R. HARVEY
We propose a measure of capital market integration arising from a conditional regime‐switching model. Our measure allows us to describe expected returns in countries that are segmented from world capital markets in one part of the sample and become integrated later in the sample. We find that a number of emerging markets exhibit time‐varying integration. Some markets appear more integrated than one might expect based on prior knowledge of investment restrictions. Other markets appear segmented even though foreigners have relatively free access to their capital markets. While there is a perception that world capital markets have become more integrated, our country‐specific investigation suggests that this is not always the case.
False (and Missed) Discoveries in Financial Economics
Published: 05/19/2020 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12951
CAMPBELL R. HARVEY, YAN LIU
Multiple testing plagues many important questions in finance such as fund and factor selection. We propose a new way to calibrate both Type I and Type II errors. Next, using a double‐bootstrap method, we establish a t‐statistic hurdle that is associated with a specific false discovery rate (e.g., 5%). We also establish a hurdle that is associated with a certain acceptable ratio of misses to false discoveries (Type II error scaled by Type I error), which effectively allows for differential costs of the two types of mistakes. Evaluating current methods, we find that they lack power to detect outperforming managers.
Conditional Skewness in Asset Pricing Tests
Published: 12/17/2002 | DOI: 10.1111/0022-1082.00247
Campbell R. Harvey, Akhtar Siddique
If asset returns have systematic skewness, expected returns should include rewards for accepting this risk. We formalize this intuition with an asset pricing model that incorporates conditional skewness. Our results show that conditional skewness helps explain the cross‐sectional variation of expected returns across assets and is significant even when factors based on size and book‐to‐market are included. Systematic skewness is economically important and commands a risk premium, on average, of 3.60 percent per year. Our results suggest that the momentum effect is related to systematic skewness. The low expected return momentum portfolios have higher skewness than high expected return portfolios.
Luck versus Skill in the Cross Section of Mutual Fund Returns: Reexamining the Evidence
Published: 03/27/2022 | DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13123
CAMPBELL R. HARVEY, YAN LIU
While Kosowski et al. (2006, Journal of Finance 61, 2551–2595) and Fama and French (2010, Journal of Finance 65, 1915–1947) both evaluate whether mutual funds outperform, their conclusions are very different. We reconcile their findings. We show that the Fama‐French method suffers from an undersampling problem that leads to a failure to reject the null hypothesis of zero alpha, even when some funds generate economically large risk‐adjusted returns. In contrast, Kosowski et al. substantially overreject the null hypothesis, even when all funds have a zero alpha. We present a novel bootstrapping approach that should be useful to future researchers choosing between the two approaches.
Foreign Speculators and Emerging Equity Markets
Published: 12/17/2002 | DOI: 10.1111/0022-1082.00220
Geert Bekaert, Campbell R. Harvey
We propose a cross‐sectional time‐series model to assess the impact of market liberalizations in emerging equity markets on the cost of capital, volatility, beta, and correlation with world market returns. Liberalizations are defined by regulatory changes, the introduction of depositary receipts and country funds, and structural breaks in equity capital flows to the emerging markets. We control for other economic events that might confound the impact of foreign speculators on local equity markets. Across a range of specifications, the cost of capital always decreases after a capital market liberalization with the effect varying between 5 and 75 basis points.
Conditioning Variables and the Cross Section of Stock Returns
Published: 12/17/2002 | DOI: 10.1111/0022-1082.00148
Wayne E. Ferson, Campbell R. Harvey
Previous studies identify predetermined variables that predict stock and bond returns through time. This paper shows that loadings on the same variables provide significant cross‐sectional explanatory power for stock portfolio returns. The loadings are significant given the three factors advocated by Fama and French (1993) and the four factors of Elton, Gruber, and Blake (1995). The explanatory power of the loadings on lagged variables is robust to various portfolio grouping procedures and other considerations. The results carry implications for risk analysis, performance measurement, cost‐of‐capital calculations, and other applications.
S&P 100 Index Option Volatility
Published: 09/01/1991 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1991.tb04631.x
CAMPBELL R. HARVEY, ROBERT E. WHALEY
Using transaction data on the S&P 100 index options, we study the effect of valuation simplifications that are commonplace in previous research on the timeseries properties of implied market volatility. Using an American‐style algorithm that accounts for the discrete nature of the dividends on the S&P 100 index, we find that spurious negative serial correlation in implied volatility changes is induced by nonsimultaneously observing the option price and the index level. Negative serial correlation is also induced by a bid/ask price effect if a single option is used to estimate implied volatility. In addition, we find that these same effects induce spurious (and unreasonable) negative cross‐correlations between the changes in call and put implied volatility.
Seasonality and Consumption‐Based Asset Pricing
Published: 06/01/1992 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1992.tb04400.x
WAYNE E. FERSON, CAMPBELL R. HARVEY
Most of the evidence on consumption‐based asset pricing is based on seasonally adjusted consumption data. The consumption‐based models have not worked well for explaining asset returns, but with seasonally adjusted data there are reasons to expect spurious rejections of the models. This paper examines asset pricing models using not seasonally adjusted aggregate consumption data. We find evidence against models with time‐separable preferences, even when the models incorporate seasonality and allow seasonal heteroskedasticity. A model that uses not seasonally adjusted consumption data and nonseparable preferences with seasonal effects works better according to several criteria. The parameter estimates imply a form of seasonal habit persistence in aggregate consumption expenditures.
Global Growth Opportunities and Market Integration
Published: 05/08/2007 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2007.01231.x
GEERT BEKAERT, CAMPBELL R. HARVEY, CHRISTIAN LUNDBLAD, STEPHAN SIEGEL
We propose an exogenous measure of a country's growth opportunities by interacting the country's local industry mix with global price to earnings (PE) ratios. We find that these exogenous growth opportunities predict future changes in real GDP and investment in a large panel of countries. This relation is strongest in countries that have liberalized their capital accounts, equity markets, and banking systems. We also find that financial development, external finance dependence, and investor protection measures are much less important in aligning growth opportunities with growth than is capital market openness. Finally, we formulate new tests of market integration and segmentation by linking local and global PE ratios to relative economic growth.