The Journal of Finance

When Uncertainty Blows in the Orchard: Comovement and Equilibrium Volatility Risk Premia

Published: 09/17/2013   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12095

ANDREA BURASCHI, FABIO TROJANI, ANDREA VEDOLIN

We provide novel evidence for an equilibrium link between investors' disagreement, the market price of volatility and correlation, and the differential pricing of index and individual equity options. We show that belief disagreement is positively related to (i) the wedge between index and individual volatility risk premia, (ii) the different slope of the smile of index and individual options, and (iii) the correlation risk premium. Priced disagreement risk also explains returns of option volatility and correlation trading strategies in a way that is robust to the inclusion of other risk factors and different market conditions.

The Disposition Effect and Underreaction to News

Published: 08/03/2006   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2006.00896.x

ANDREA FRAZZINI

This paper tests whether the “disposition effect,” that is the tendency of investors to ride losses and realize gains, induces “underreaction” to news, leading to return predictability. I use data on mutual fund holdings to construct a new measure of reference purchasing prices for individual stocks, and I show that post‐announcement price drift is most severe whenever capital gains and the news event have the same sign. The magnitude of the drift depends on the capital gains (losses) experienced by the stock holders on the event date. An event‐driven strategy based on this effect yields monthly alphas of over 200 basis points.

Endogenous Liquidity in Asset Markets

Published: 11/27/2005   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2004.00625.x

Andrea L. Eisfeldt

This paper analyzes a model in which long‐term risky assets are illiquid due to adverse selection. The degree of adverse selection and hence the liquidity of these assets is determined endogenously by the amount of trade for reasons other than private information. I find that higher productivity leads to increased liquidity. Moreover, liquidity magnifies the effects of changes in productivity on investment and volume. High productivity implies that investors initiate larger scale risky projects which increases the riskiness of their incomes. Riskier incomes induce more sales of claims to high‐quality projects, causing liquidity to increase.

Habit Formation and Macroeconomic Models of the Term Structure of Interest Rates

Published: 11/28/2007   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2007.01299.x

ANDREA BURASCHI, ALEXEI JILTSOV

This paper introduces a new class of nonaffine models of the term structure of interest rates that is supported by an economy with habit formation. Distinguishing features of the model are that the interest rate dynamics are nonlinear, interest rates depend on lagged monetary and consumption shocks, and the price of risk is not a constant multiple of interest rate volatility. We find that habit persistence can help reproduce the nonlinearity of the spot rate process, the documented deviations from the expectations hypothesis, the persistence of the conditional volatility of interest rates, and the lead‐lag relationship between interest rates and monetary aggregates.

Economic Links and Predictable Returns

Published: 07/19/2008   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2008.01379.x

LAUREN COHEN, ANDREA FRAZZINI

This paper finds evidence of return predictability across economically linked firms. We test the hypothesis that in the presence of investors subject to attention constraints, stock prices do not promptly incorporate news about economically related firms, generating return predictability across assets. Using a data set of firms' principal customers to identify a set of economically related firms, we show that stock prices do not incorporate news involving related firms, generating predictable subsequent price moves. A long–short equity strategy based on this effect yields monthly alphas of over 150 basis points.

Model Uncertainty and Option Markets with Heterogeneous Beliefs

Published: 01/11/2007   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2006.01006.x

ANDREA BURASCHI, ALEXEI JILTSOV

This paper provides option pricing and volume implications for an economy with heterogeneous agents who face model uncertainty and have different beliefs on expected returns. Market incompleteness makes options nonredundant, while heterogeneity creates a link between differences in beliefs and option volumes. We solve for both option prices and volumes and test the joint empirical implications using S&P500 index option data. Specifically, we use survey data to build an Index of Dispersion in Beliefs and find that a model that takes information heterogeneity into account can explain the dynamics of option volume and the smile better than can reduced‐form models with stochastic volatility.

The Value of Financial Flexibility

Published: 09/10/2008   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2008.01397.x

ANDREA GAMBA, ALEXANDER TRIANTIS

We develop a model that endogenizes dynamic financing, investment, and cash retention/payout policies in order to analyze the effect of financial flexibility on firm value. We show that the value of financing flexibility depends on the costs of external financing, the level of corporate and personal tax rates that determine the effective cost of holding cash, the firm's growth potential and maturity, and the reversibility of capital. Through simulations, we demonstrate that firms facing financing frictions should simultaneously borrow and lend, and we examine the nature of dynamic debt and liquidity policies and the value associated with corporate liquidity.

Organization Capital and the Cross‐Section of Expected Returns

Published: 02/15/2013   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12034

ANDREA L. EISFELDT, DIMITRIS PAPANIKOLAOU

Organization capital is a production factor that is embodied in the firm's key talent and has an efficiency that is firm specific. Hence, both shareholders and key talent have a claim to its cash flows. We develop a model in which the outside option of the key talent determines the share of firm cash flows that accrue to shareholders. This outside option varies systematically and renders firms with high organization capital riskier from shareholders' perspective. We find that firms with more organization capital have average returns that are 4.6% higher than firms with less organization capital.

Institutional Trade Persistence and Long‐Term Equity Returns

Published: 03/21/2011   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2010.01644.x

AMIL DASGUPTA, ANDREA PRAT, MICHELA VERARDO

Recent studies show that single‐quarter institutional herding positively predicts short‐term returns. Motivated by the theoretical herding literature, which emphasizes endogenous persistence in decisions over time, we estimate the effect of multiquarter institutional buying and selling on stock returns. Using both regression and portfolio tests, we find that persistent institutional trading negatively predicts long‐term returns: persistently sold stocks outperform persistently bought stocks at long horizons. The negative association between returns and institutional trade persistence is not subsumed by past returns or other stock characteristics, is concentrated among smaller stocks, and is stronger for stocks with higher institutional ownership.

Sell‐Side School Ties

Published: 07/15/2010   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2010.01574.x

LAUREN COHEN, ANDREA FRAZZINI, CHRISTOPHER MALLOY

We study the impact of social networks on agents’ ability to gather superior information about firms. Exploiting novel data on the educational background of sell‐side analysts and senior corporate officers, we find that analysts outperform by up to 6.60% per year on their stock recommendations when they have an educational link to the company. Pre‐Reg FD, this school‐tie return premium is 9.36% per year, while post‐Reg FD it is nearly zero. In contrast, in an environment that did not change selective disclosure regulation (the U.K.), the school‐tie premium is large and significant over the entire sample period.

Incentives and Endogenous Risk Taking: A Structural View on Hedge Fund Alphas

Published: 04/08/2014   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12167

ANDREA BURASCHI, ROBERT KOSOWSKI, WORRAWAT SRITRAKUL

Hedge fund managers are subject to several nonlinear incentives: performance fee options (call); equity investors' redemption options (put); and prime broker contracts allowing for forced deleverage (put). The interaction of these option‐like incentives affects optimal leverage ex ante, depending on the distance of fund‐value from the high‐water mark. We study how these endogenous effects influence performance measures used in the literature. We show that reduced‐form measures that do not account for these features are subject to economically significant false discovery biases. The result is stronger for low‐quality funds. We propose an alternative structural methodology for conducting performance attribution in hedge funds.

Model‐Free International Stochastic Discount Factors

Published: 07/31/2020   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12970

MIRELA SANDULESCU, FABIO TROJANI, ANDREA VEDOLIN

We provide a theoretical framework to uncover in a model‐free way the relationships among international stochastic discount factors (SDFs), stochastic wedges, and financial market structures. Exchange rates are in general different from the ratio of international SDFs in incomplete markets, as captured by a stochastic wedge. We show theoretically that this wedge can be zero in incomplete and integrated markets. Market segmentation breaks the strong link between exchange rates and international SDFs, which helps address salient features of international asset returns while keeping the volatility and cross‐country correlation of SDFs at moderate levels.

Complex Asset Markets

Published: 07/20/2023   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13264

ANDREA L. EISFELDT, HANNO LUSTIG, LEI ZHANG

Investors' individual arbitrage models introduce idiosyncratic risk into complex asset strategies, driving up average returns and Sharpe ratios. However, despite the attractive risk‐return trade‐off, participation is limited. This is because effective Sharpe ratios in complex asset markets vary with investors' expertise. Investors with higher expertise, better models, and lower resulting idiosyncratic risk exposures realize higher Sharpe ratios. Their demand deters entry by less sophisticated investors. As predicted by our model, market dislocations are characterized by an increase in idiosyncratic risk, investor exit, and persistently elevated alphas and Sharpe ratios. The selection effect from higher expertise agents' more favorable Sharpe ratios is unique to our model and key to our main results.

Correlation Risk and Optimal Portfolio Choice

Published: 01/13/2010   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2009.01533.x

ANDREA BURASCHI, PAOLO PORCHIA, FABIO TROJANI

We develop a new framework for multivariate intertemporal portfolio choice that allows us to derive optimal portfolio implications for economies in which the degree of correlation across industries, countries, or asset classes is stochastic. Optimal portfolios include distinct hedging components against both stochastic volatility and correlation risk. We find that the hedging demand is typically larger than in univariate models, and it includes an economically significant covariance hedging component, which tends to increase with the persistence of variance–covariance shocks, the strength of leverage effects, the dimension of the investment opportunity set, and the presence of portfolio constraints.

Exchange Rates and Monetary Policy Uncertainty

Published: 02/02/2017   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12499

PHILIPPE MUELLER, ALIREZA TAHBAZ‐SALEHI, ANDREA VEDOLIN

We document that a trading strategy that is short the U.S. dollar and long other currencies exhibits significantly larger excess returns on days with scheduled Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements. We show that these excess returns (i) are higher for currencies with higher interest rate differentials vis‐à‐vis the United States, (ii) increase with uncertainty about monetary policy, and (iii) increase further when the Federal Reserve adopts a policy of monetary easing. We interpret these excess returns as compensation for monetary policy uncertainty within a parsimonious model of constrained financiers who intermediate global demand for currencies.

The Cross Section of MBS Returns

Published: 06/15/2021   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.13055

PETER DIEP, ANDREA L. EISFELDT, SCOTT RICHARDSON

We present a simple, linear asset pricing model of the cross section of Mortgage‐Backed Security (MBS) returns. MBS earn risk premia as compensation for their exposure to prepayment risk. We measure prepayment risk and estimate risk loadings using prepayment forecasts versus realizations. Estimated loadings on prepayment risk decrease monotonically in securities' coupons relative to the par coupon, consistent with the predicted effect of prepayment on bond value. Prepayment risk appears to be priced by specialized MBS investors. The price of prepayment risk changes sign over time with the sign of a representative MBS investor's exposure to prepayment shocks.

Brokers and Order Flow Leakage: Evidence from Fire Sales

Published: 08/09/2019   |   DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12840

ANDREA BARBON, MARCO DI MAGGIO, FRANCESCO FRANZONI, AUGUSTIN LANDIER

Using trade‐level data, we study whether brokers play a role in spreading order flow information in the stock market. We focus on large portfolio liquidations that result in temporary price drops, and identify the brokers who intermediate these trades. These brokers’ clients are more likely to predate on the liquidating funds than to provide liquidity. Predation leads to profits of about 25 basis points over 10 days and increases the liquidation costs of the distressed fund by 40%. This evidence suggests a role of information leakage in exacerbating fire sales.

The Effect of Three Mile Island on Utility Bond Risk Premia: A Note

Published: 03/01/1986   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1986.tb04504.x

W. BRIAN BARRETT, ANDREA J. HEUSON, ROBERT W. KOLB

The Interim Trading Skills of Institutional Investors

Published: 03/21/2011   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2010.01643.x

ANDY PUCKETT, XUEMIN (STERLING) YAN

Using a large proprietary database of institutional trades, this paper examines the interim (intraquarter) trading skills of institutional investors. We find strong evidence that institutional investors earn significant abnormal returns on their trades within the trading quarter and that interim trading performance is persistent. After transactions costs, our estimates suggest that interim trading skills contribute between 20 and 26 basis points per year to the average fund's abnormal performance. Our findings also indicate that any trading skills documented by previous studies that use quarterly data are biased downwards because of their inability to account for interim trades.

Stock Returns, Dividend Yields, and Taxes

Published: 12/17/2002   |   DOI: 10.1111/0022-1082.00082

Andy Naranjo, M. Nimalendran, Mike Ryngaert

Using an improved measure of a common stock's annualized dividend yield, we document that risk‐adjusted NYSE stock returns increase in dividend yield during the period from 1963 to 1994. This relation between return and yield is robust to various specifications of multifactor asset pricing models that incorporate the Fama–French factors. The magnitude of the yield effect is too large to be explained by a “tax penalty” on dividend income and is not explained by previously documented anomalies. Interestingly, the effect is primarily driven by smaller market capitalization stocks and zero‐yield stocks.