analyst forecasting errors additional evidence analyst forecasting errors are approximately as large as dreman and berry 1995 documented and an optimistic bias is evident for all years from 1985 through 1996 in contrast to their findings i show that analyst forecasting errors and bias have decreased over time moreover the optimistic bias in quarterly forecasts was absent for sp 2 firms with comparatively large amounts of market capitalization absolute value of earnings forecast and analyst following and 3 firms in certain industries

the macroeconomic effect of import controls a keynesian analysis abstract this paper develops a keynesian analysis of import controls a simple multiplier model is first presented which captures the two basic effects of controls identified by keynesian and disequilibrium theories forced import substitution and involuntary disabsorption the analysis is then extended to include some intertemporal and fiscal effects later sections develop a more complex model in which the market for goods and services is considered together with the effects of controls on the supply and demand for money and on the black market for foreign exchange

non zero sum stochastic differential reinsurance and investment games with default risk this paper investigates the implications of strategic interaction i e competition between two cara insurers on their reinsurance investment policies the two insurers are concerned about their terminal wealth and the relative performance measured by the difference in their terminal wealth the problem of finding optimal policies for both insurers is modelled as a non zero sum stochastic differential game the reinsurance premium is calculated using the variance premium principle and the insurers can invest in a risk free asset a risky asset with heston s stochastic volatility and a defaultable corporate bond we derive the nash equilibrium reinsurance policy and investment policy explicitly for the game and prove the corresponding verification theorem the equilibrium strategy indicates that the best response of each insurer to the competition is to mimic the strategy of its opponent consequently either the reinsurance strategy or the investment strategy of an insurer with the relative performance concern is riskier than that without the concern numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the findings of this study

martingales and arbitrage in securities markets with transaction costs abstract we derive the implications from the absence of arbitrage in dynamic securities markets with bid ask spreads the absence of arbitrage is equivalent to the existence of at least an equivalent probability measure that transforms some process between the bid and the ask price processes of traded securities into a martingale the martingale measures can be interpreted as possible linear pricing rules and can be used to determine the investment opportunities available in such an economy the minimum cost at which a contingent claim can be obtained through securities trading is its largest expected value with respect to the martingale measures journal of economic literature classification numbers g11 g12 g13 d52 and d90

having your cake and eating it too the before and after tax efficiencies of an extended equity mandate this article shows that extended mandates are especially effective for investors subject to taxes not only is the portfolio more efficiently positioned from a before tax perspective but it also offers significant after tax benefits from both increased loss harvesting and tax arbitrage between tax rates on long and short positions

comparisons and combinations of long and long short strategies market neutral long short strategies get their returns from alphas and short rebates long strategies get their returns from alpha and the market differing return and risk sources complicate their comparison partly because of the strong market referenced focus of conventional performance analysis compelling theoretical advantages of active return per unit of active risk suggest that long short strategies are better able to deliver excess return than are conventional institutional long strategies long short strategies even with tiny positive alphas are seen to improve investors efficient frontiers when added to a traditional t bill long portfolio mix mostly because their risk sources are uncorrelated surprisingly the improvement occurs even if long short strategies are sharpe ratio inferior to long strategies these results provide theoretical support for including long short strategies in most investors mix of assets

the efficiency gains of long short investing long short strategies have generated controversy and institutional interest for more than 10 years we analyzed the efficiency gains of long short investing where we defined efficiency as the information ratio of the implemented strategy the optimal portfolio relative to the intrinsic information ratio of the alphas the efficiency advantage of long short investing arises from the loosening of the surprisingly important long only constraint long short and long only managers need to understand the impact of this significant constraint long short implementations offer the most improvement over long only implementations when the universe of assets is large asset volatility is low and the strategy has high active risk the long only constraint induces biases particularly toward small stocks limits the manager s ability to act on upside information by not allowing short positions that could finance long positions and reduces the efficiency of traditional high risk long only strategies relative t

return autocorrelation and institutional investors abstract we propose and test the hypothesis that trading by institutional investors contributes to serial correlation in daily returns our results demonstrate that nyse particles and individual security daily return autocorrelationsare an increasing function of the level of institutional ownership moreover the results are consistent with the hypothesis that institutional trading reflects information and increases the speed of price adjustment the relation between autocorrelation and institutional holdings does not however apparent to be driven by market frictions or rational time varying required rates of return we conclude that institutional investors correlated trading patterns contribute to axial correlation in daily returns

the slave trade and the origins of mistrust in africa in a recent study nunn 2008 examines the long term impacts of africa s slave trade he finds that the slave trade which occurred over a period of more than 400 years had a significant negative effect on long term economic development although the article arguably identifies a negative causal relationship between the slave trade and income today the analysis is unable to establish the exact causal mechanisms underlying this reduced form relationship in this article we examine one of the channels through which the slave trade may affect economic development today combining contemporary individual level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group we ask whether the slave trade caused a culture of mistrust to develop within africa initially slaves were captured primarily through state organized raids and warfare but as the trade progressed the environment of ubiquitous insecurity caused individuals to turn on others including friends and family members and to kidnap trick and sell each other into slavery sigismund wilhelm koelle 1854 p e h hair 1965 charles piot 1996 we hypothesize that in this environment a culture of mistrust may have evolved which may persist to this day we show that current differences in trust levels within africa can be traced back to the transatlantic and indian ocean slave trades combining contemporary individual level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group we find that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today evidence from a variety of identification strategies suggests that the relationship is causal examining causal mechanisms we show that most of the impact of the slave trade is through factors that are internal to the individual such as cultural norms beliefs and values jel j15 n57 z13

occupational choice and the spirit of capitalism the british industrial revolution triggered a socioeconomic transformation whereby the landowning aristocracy was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group we propose a theory of preference formation under financial market imperfections that can account for this pattern parents shape their children s preferences in response to economic incentives middle class families in occupations requiring effort skill and experience develop patience and a work ethic whereas upper class families relying on rental income cultivate a refined taste for leisure these class specific attitudes which are rooted in the nature of preindustrial professions become key determinants of success once industrialization transforms the economic landscape i introduction the industrial revolution was more than capital accumulation and growth it also set off a social and political transformation that redefined hierarchies in society and reshaped the distribution of income and wealth before the onset of industrialization in eighteenth century britain wealth and political power were associated with the possession of land over the course of the nineteenth century a new class of entrepreneurs and businessmen emerged as the economic elite for the most part the members of this class rose from humble beginnings and had their social origins in the urban middle classes the landed elite was left behind and eventually lost its political and economic predominance many observers of the time linked this reversal in economic fortunes to differences in values attitudes and ultimately preferences across social classes there are countless examples both in scholarly and in fictional writing of portrayals of members of the landowning class as averse to work unwilling to save ill disposed tocommercialactivity andunabletoconsidermoneyassomething

leverage aversion and portfolio optimality portfolio volatility is the only source of risk in mean variance optimality but it fails to capture all the risks faced by leveraged portfolios these risks include the possibility of margin calls and forced liquidations at adverse prices and losses beyond the capital invested to recognize these risks the authors incorporated leverage aversion into the optimization process and examined the effects of volatility and leverage aversion on optimal long short portfolios

ethnic diversity and economic development abstract this paper analyzes the role that different indices and dimensions of ethnicity play in the process of economic development firstly we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of alternative data sources for the construction of indices of religious and ethnic heterogeneity secondly we compare the index of fractionalization and the index of polarization we argue that an index of the family of discrete polarization measures is the adequate indicator to measure potential conflict we find that ethnic religious polarization has a large and negative effect on economic development through the reduction of investment and the increase of government consumption and the probability of a civil conflict

evaluating the impact of inequality constraints and parameter uncertainty on optimal portfolio choice we present new analytical results for the impact of portfolio weight constraints on an investor s optimal portfolio when parameter uncertainty is taken into account while it is well known that parameter uncertainty and imposing weight constraints results in reduced certainty equivalent returns in the general case there are no analytical results in a special case commonly used in the funds management literature we derive analytical expression for the certainty equivalent loss that does not depend on the risk aversion parameter we illustrate our theoretical results using hedge fund data from the perspective of a fund of fund manager our contribution is to formalize the framework to investigate this problem as well as providing tractable analytical solutions that can be implemented using either simulated or asset manager returns

trading volume and serial correlation in stock returns this paper investigates the relationship between aggregate stock market trading volume and the serial correlation of daily stock returns for both stock indexes and individual large stocks the first order daily return autocorrelation tends to decline with volume the paper explains this phenomenon using a model in which risk averse market makers accommodate buying or selling pressure from liquidity or noninformational traders changing expected stock returns reward market makers for playing this role the model implies that a stock price decline on a high volume day is more likely than a stock price decline on a low volume day to be associated with an increase in the expected stock return

large block transactions the speed of response and temporary and permanent stock price effects abstract the paper investigates how quickly prices attain new equilibrium levels after large block transactions and measures the associated temporary and permanent price effects we find that prices adjust within at most three trades with most of the adjustment occurring in the first trade the temporary price effect for seller initiated transactions is related to block size but the temporary price effect observed for buyer initiated transactions is no larger than that observed in 100 share trades most of the price effect associated with block trades is permanent and is related to block size regardless of the initiating party

import controls prices and economic activity in colombia abstract this paper analyzes the effects of import controls on production and price formation in the colombian manufacturing sector in 1976 1987 for that purpose it presents and estimates a simple model of imperfect competition which captures the quantity and price effects of qrs the statistical results support the idea that direct import controls have strong quantity and weak price effects the former concentrate in a few sectors particularly machinery and equipment most of which are not sensible to relative import prices however even in sectors where qrs have weak direct quantity effects indirect effects of import policy may be important given the sensitivity of industrial production to aggregate demand

the behavior of stock prices around institutional trades all trades executed by 37 large investment management firms from july 1986 to december 1988 are used to study the price impact and execution cost of the entire sequence package of trades that we interpret as an order we find that market impact and trading cost are related to firm capitalization relative package size and most importantly to the identity of the management firm behind the trade money managers with high demands for immediacy tend to be associated with larger market impact financial economists have long studied the equity trading process and its impact on stock prices much prior empirical research isolates individual trades and analyzes the behavior of the stock price around each trade see for example kraus and stoll 1972a holthausen leftwich and mayers 1987 1990 keim and madhavan 1991 petersen and umlauf 1991 hausman lo and mackinlay 1992 and chan and lakonishok 1993 evaluating the behavior of stock prices around trades provides a means of discriminating among various hypotheses as to the elasticity of the demand for stocks yields an estimate of the cost of executing trades and a measure of the liquidity of a market and permits tests of different models of the determination of quotes and transaction prices for many institutional investors however even a moderately sized position in a stock may represent a large fraction of the stock s trading volume accordingly an investment manager s order is often broken up into several trades it is often misleading therefore to consider an individual trade as the basic unit of analysis in the study of trading activity and its effects on prices this paper uses the record of trades executed by 37 large investment manage

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

60 years of portfolio optimization practical challenges and current trends abstract the concepts of portfolio optimization and diversification have been instrumental in the development and understanding of financial markets and financial decision making in light of the 60 year anniversary of harry markowitz s paper portfolio selection we review some of the approaches developed to address the challenges encountered when using portfolio optimization in practice including the inclusion of transaction costs portfolio management constraints and the sensitivity to the estimates of expected returns and covariances in addition we selectively highlight some of the new trends and developments in the area such as diversification methods risk parity portfolios the mixing of different sources of alpha and practical multi period portfolio optimization

fundamentals of efficient factor investing corrected may 2017 combining long only constrained factor subportfolios is generally not a mean variance efficient way to capture expected factor returns for example a combination of four fully invested factor subportfolios low beta small size value and momentum captures less than half e g 40 of the potential improvement over the market portfolio s sharpe ratio in contrast a long only portfolio of individual securities using the same risk model and return forecasts captures most e g 80 of the potential improvement we adapt traditional portfolio theory to more recently popularized factor based investing and simulate optimal combinations of factor and security portfolios using the largest 1 000 common stocks in the us equity market from 1968 to 2015

determinants of portfolio performance in order to delineate investment responsibility and measure performance contribution pension plan sponsors and investment managers need a clear and relevant method of attributing returns to those

economic integration and political disintegration in a world of trade restrictions large countries enjoy economic benefits because political boundaries determine the size of the market under free trade and global markets even relatively small cultural linguistic or ethnic groups can benefit from forming small homogeneous political jurisdictions this paper provides a formal model of the relationship between openness and the equilibrium number and size of countries and successfully tests two implications of the model firstly the economic benefits of country size are mediated by the degree of openness to trade secondly the history of nation state creations and secessions is influenced by the trade regime

trading cost the critical link between investment information and results 1983 trading cost the critical link between investment information and results financial analysts journal vol 39 no 3 pp 39 44

the myth of the absolute return investor the notion of absolute return investing is spreading like wildfire many people believe that superior returns can be achieved by managers with strong views and little regard for benchmarks this article attempts to define absolute return investing and figure out whether it exists the conclusion is that all investment returns consist of a beta part representing the correlation of the active portfolio with one or more market benchmarks or normal portfolios and an active alpha part thus all investing is relative return investing in which active returns are earned relative to an appropriate benchmark or mix of benchmarks

liquidity investment style and the relation between fund size and fund performance using stock transactions data along with detailed stockholdings for a comprehensive sample of u s actively managed equity mutual funds from 1993 to 2002 this paper empirically examines the effect of liquidity and investment style on the relation between fund size and fund performance consistent with chen hong huang and kubik 2004 i find a significant inverse relation between fund size and fund performance further this inverse relation is stronger among funds that hold less liquid portfolios the inverse relation between fund size and fund performance is also more pronounced among growth and high turnover funds that tend to have high demands for immediacy overall this paper s findings suggest that liquidity is an important reason why fund size erodes performance

inflation growth and import bottlenecks in the turkish manufacturing industry abstract this paper argues that in economies heavily dependent on imported inputs the responsiveness of price and output to cost and demand factors are altered by foreign exchange bottlenecks if the government resorts to non market allocation of import licenses a model of price and output determination which captures this stipulation is presented estimation results for the turkish manufacturing industry over the 1952 1980 periods support the hypothesis that price and output elasticities are different between the import crisis and non crisis periods most importantly monetary expansion is inflationary when there are important bottlenecks but has real output effects otherwise

in defense of portfolio optimization what if we can forecast author response we thank richard o michaud david n esch and robert o michaud for their interest in our paper in their letter they suggest that our results are inconsistent with the canonical literature beca

a direct test of methods for inferring trade direction from intra day data this study directly tests the ability of several competing methods to identify market buy and sell orders using intra day quote and trade prices and identifies factors that affect the accuracy of the methods lee and ready s 1991 algorithm performs about the same as the tick test but the performance of both methods is worse than expected the results show that the use of either algorithm to classify trades can lead to significantly biased estimates of effective spreads and signed volume but the tick test provides better estimates of effective spreads and signed volume than lee and ready s method i introduction the use of intra day prices in empirical studies of securities markets is increasingly common and studies frequently require trades be identified as buyer or seller initiated unfortunately most data sets do not identify trade direction methods have however been proposed that allow trade direction to be inferred from adjacent prices and quotes the accuracy of these methods and the implica tions for microstructure research are still unresolved issues in large part because trade direction is unobservable in most financial data sets this study directly tests the ability of several competing methods to iden tify market buy and sell orders using intra day quote and trade prices the tests are conducted using the torq database a unique data set the new york stock exchange makes available to researchers that contains information on trades quotes and orders using the tick tests and lee and ready s lr hereafter 1991 method to classify trades as buys or sells and comparing the results to the direction of the actual orders i directly test the accuracy of the classification algorithms the tests also identify the factors that affect the accuracy of the clas sification methods additional tests demonstrate that using these algorithms can lead to biased inferences in two of their most common applications estimating effective spreads and signed volume trading test results also show that the tick

religion and economy religion has a two way interaction with political economy with religion viewed as a dependent variable a central question is how economic development and political institutions affect religious participation and beliefs with religion viewed as an independent variable a key issue is how religiosity affects individual characteristics such as work ethic honesty and thrift and thereby influences economic performance in this paper we sketch previous studies of this two way interaction but focus on our ongoing quantitative research with international data

war and local collective action in sierra leone abstract we study the brutal 1991 2002 sierra leone civil war using nationally representative household data on conflict experiences postwar economic outcomes local politics and collective action individuals whose households directly experienced more intense war violence are robustly more likely to attend community meetings more likely to join local political and community groups and more likely to vote tests using prewar controls and alternative samples suggest that selection into victimization is unlikely to be driving the results more speculatively the findings could help partially explain the rapid postwar political and economic recoveries observed in sierra leone and after several other recent african civil wars

dynamic portfolio optimization with transaction costs heuristics and dual bounds we consider the problem of dynamic portfolio optimization in a discrete time finite horizon setting our general model considers risk aversion portfolio constraints e g no short positions return predictability and transaction costs this problem is naturally formulated as a stochastic dynamic program unfortunately with nonzero transaction costs the dimension of the state space is at least as large as the number of assets and the problem is very difficult to solve with more than one or two assets in this paper we consider several easy to compute heuristic trading strategies that are based on optimizing simpler models we complement these heuristics with upper bounds on the performance with an optimal trading strategy these bounds are based on the dual approach developed in brown et al brown d b j e smith p sun 2009 information relaxations and duality in stochastic dynamic programs oper res 58 4 785 801 in this context these bounds are given by considering an investor who has access to perfect information about future returns but is penalized for using this advance information these heuristic strategies and bounds can be evaluated using monte carlo simulation we evaluate these heuristics and bounds in numerical experiments with a risk free asset and 3 or 10 risky assets in many cases the performance of the heuristic strategy is very close to the upper bound indicating that the heuristic strategies are very nearly optimal this paper was accepted by dimitris bertsimas optimization

portfolio frontiers with restrictions to tracking error volatility and value at risk abstract asset managers are often given the task of restricting their activity by keeping both the value at risk var and the tracking error volatility tev under control however these constraints may be impossible to satisfy simultaneously because var is independent of the benchmark portfolio the management of these restrictions is likely to affect portfolio performance and produces a wide variety of scenarios in the risk return space the aim of this paper is to analyse various interactions between portfolio frontiers when risk managers impose joint restrictions upon tev and var specifically we provide analytical solutions for all the intersections and we propose simple numerical methods when such solutions are not available finally we introduce a new portfolio frontier

how variation in signal quality affects performance the information coefficient ic the correlation between forecasted and realized return is a popular measure of signal quality as shown in this article variation in ic is an important source of active risk and ic variation has an effect on optimal portfolio structure contrary to popular belief the ability to take short positions in equity portfolios does not necessarily lead to superior performance managers who can maintain a stable ic over time will benefit from short extensions but managers who have an unstable ic may see their performance deteriorate from increased short positions

dynamic trading policies with price impact abstract in this paper we analyze the optimal policy for a risk averse agent who wants to sell a large block of shares of a risky security in the presence of price impact and transactions costs our framework reduces to the standard merton portfolio problem in the absence of any market frictions optimal liquidation results in revenue distributions which are substantially different from those generated by a naive strategy the main tradeoff involves choosing between revenue distributions which have high means versus those which have low variances furthermore our results suggest that the effective liquidity of a security depends on its return distribution and on the characteristics of the agent carrying out the trade as well as on the price impact function

the tax benefits of separating alpha from beta long only active investment strategies have an inherent flaw investors pay capital gains taxes on market related gains as well as on the alpha created by separating alpha and beta taxes can be r

respect responsibility and development abstract we develop a theory that explains how two core values respect for others and responsibility affect productivity the accumulation of capital and output per worker using data from the world values survey we empirically test the model using a panel dataset that includes 82 countries over six distinct years we find that these two core values are important to production and that their impact is substantial we also show that respect and responsibility reduce the influence of trust and mitigate the negative macroeconomic effects associated with fractionalized societies our results are robust to various treatments for endogeneity and under alternative samples

a model of competitive stock trading volume a model of competitive stock trading is developed in which investors are heterogeneous in their information and private investment opportunities and rationally trade for both informational and noninformational motives i examine the link between the nature of heterogeneity among investors and the behavior of trading volume and its relation to price dynamics it is found that volume is positively correlated with absolute changes in prices and dividends i show that informational trading and noninformational trading lead to different dynamic relations between trading volume and stock returns

on the optimality of long short strategies we consider the optimality of portfolios not subject to short selling constraints and derive conditions that a universe of securities must satisfy for an optimal active portfolio to be dollar neutr

the upstairs market for large block transactions analysis and measurement of price effects this article develops a model of the upstairs market where order size beliefs and prices are determined endogenously we test the model s predictions using unique data for 5 625 equity trades during the period 1985 to 1992 that are known to be upstairs transactions and are identified as either buyer or seller initiated we find that price movements prior to the trade date are significantly positively related to trade size consistent with information leakage as the block is shopped upstairs further the temporary price impact or liquidity effect is a concave function of order size which may result from upstairs intermediation

can money flows predict stock returns money flow is defined as the difference between uptick and downtick dollar trading volume despite little published research regarding its usefulness the measure has become an increasingly popular technical indicator our analysis demonstrates that money flows are highly correlated with same period returns we also found strong evidence of money flow momentum in that lagged money flows can be used to predict future money flows most important is our finding that money flows appear to predict cross sectional variation in future returns their predictive ability is sensitive however to the method of money flow measurement e g the exclusion or inclusion of block trades and the forecast horizon

return predictability following large price changes and information releases abstract we examine return behavior following large price change events unconditional post event abnormal returns are found to be unimportant as we condition on other criteria related to the quality of information like volume and public announcements the abnormal returns become large the type of news provides further refinement if the news relates to earnings or analyst recommendations then the 20 day abnormal returns become much larger ranging from 3 to 4 for positive events and about 2 25 for negative events finally an out of sample trading strategy confirms investor under reaction and generates significant abnormal annualized returns of the order of 12 18

illiquidity position limits and optimal investment for mutual funds we study the optimal trading strategy of mutual funds that face both position limits and differential illiquidity we provide explicit characterization of the optimal trading strategy and conduct an extensive analytical and numerical analysis of the optimal trading strategy we show that the optimal trading boundaries are increasing in both the lower and the upper position limits we find that position limits can affect current trading strategy even when they are not currently binding and other seemingly intuitive trading strategies can be costly we also examine the optimal choice of position limits

volume for winners and losers taxation and other motives for stock trading capital gains taxes create incentives to trade our major finding is that turnover is higher for winners stocks the prices of which have increased than for losers which is not consistent with the tax prediction however the turnover in december and january is evidence of tax motivated trading there is a relatively high turnover for losers in december and for winners in january we conclude that taxes influence turnover but other motives for trading are more important we were unable to find evidence that changing the length of the holding period required to qualify for long term capital gains treatment affected turnover investors responding to the tax incentives in the capital gains laws should produce predictable patterns in the volume of trading in a stock but not necessarily in its price this study uses past price patterns as a proxy to measure the incentives to sell or avoid selling a stock and observes trading volumes to estimate the extent to which investors respond to these incentives past price patterns may influence trading volumes for other non tax related reasons as well these are also considered we find that past prices influence current incentives to trade through both tax and non tax motives winners tend to have higher abnormal volumes than losers this would be expected if non tax related motives were predominant however the influence of tax related motives on trading volume is shown by seasonal variations in the relationship between past price changes and turnover as predicted by tax induced trading theories the volume of losers is higher than normal in december and the volume of winners is higher than normal in january we found no evidence that trading volume was affected by changes in the length of the holding period required to qualify for long term capital gains investors reactions to capital gains taxes are important for several reasons first a comprehensive understanding of investor behavior would include both price and volume understanding the relationship between taxes and volume is a fruitful and convenient method of contributing to this subject the resource allocation consequences of capital gains taxes are controversial in part because

war and local collective action in sierra leone a comment on the use of coefficient stability approaches abstract in a study of the effect of civil war exposure on local collective action outcomes in sierra leone bellows and miguel 2009 employ a coefficient stability approach to assess the importance of omitted variable bias building on altonji et al 2005a here we clarify the econometric assumptions underlying bellows and miguel 2009 and extend their analysis using data on dependent variable reliability ratios and the method developed in oster 2015

portfolio constraints and the fundamental law of active management active portfolio management is typically conducted within constraints that do not allow managers to fully exploit their ability to forecast returns constraints on short positions and turnover for example are fairly common and materially restrictive other constraints such as market capitalization and value growth neutrality with respect to the benchmark or economic sector constraints can further restrict an active portfolio s composition we derive ex ante and ex post correlation relationships that facilitate the performance analysis of constrained portfolios the ex ante relationship is a generalized version of a previously developed fundamental law of active management and provides an important strategic perspective on the potential for active management to add value the ex post correlation relationship represents a practical decomposition of performance into the success of the return prediction process and the noise associated with portfolio constraints we verify the accuracy of these relati

the price dynamics of common trading strategies a deterministic trading strategy can be regarded as a signal processing element that uses external information and past prices as inputs and incorporates them into future prices this paper uses a market maker based method of price formation to study the price dynamics induced by several commonly used financial trading strategies showing how they amplify noise induce structure in prices and cause phenomena such as excess and clustered volatility

transparency and liquidity a study of block trades on the london stock exchange under different publication rules this article examines whether reducing a market s transparency by delaying the publication of prices for block trades has any impact on liquidity the analysis uses a sample of 5987 blocks from the london stock exchange that cover three different publication regimes immediate 1987 88 90 minutes 1991 92 and 24 hours 1989 90 delaying publication does not affect the time taken by prices to reach a new level which is rapid under all regimes spreads differ across years but their size relates more closely to market volatility than to speed of publication there is therefore no gain in liquidity from delayed publication

optimal consumption choices for a large investor abstract this paper examines the optimal consumption and investment problem for a large investor whose portfolio choices affect the instantaneous expected returns on the traded assets alternatively our analysis can be interpreted in terms of an optimal growth problem with nonlinear technologies existence of optimal policies is established using martingale and duality techniques under general assumptions on the securities price process and the investor s preferences as an illustration of our characterization result explicit solutions are provided for specific examples involving an agent with logarithmic utilities and a generalized two factor version of the ccapm is derived the analogy of the consumption problem examined in this paper to the consumption problem with constraints on the portfolio choices is emphasized

performance attribution and the fundamental law the reported study operationalized the fundamental law of active management in the context of a factor based performance attribution system the system incorporates factor payoffs in the linear regression framework that many portfolio managers and external reviewers use to judge what is being rewarded in the market the study indicates that parameters of the fundamental law can be used to approximate and interpret the results of the regression based performance attribution system the procedure is illustrated by the use of security holdings returns and factor exposure data for two portfolios benchmarked to the s p 500 index for april 1995 to march 2004

egalitarianism and international investment abstract this study identifies how country differences on a key cultural dimension egalitarianism influence international investment flows a society s cultural orientation toward egalitarianism is manifested by intolerance for abuses of market and political power and a desire for protecting less powerful actors we show egalitarianism to be based on exogenous factors including social fractionalization dominant religion circa 1900 and war experience from the 19th century we find a robust influence of egalitarianism distance on cross national flows of bond and equity issuances syndicated loans and mergers and acquisitions an informal cultural institution largely determined a century or more ago egalitarianism exercises its effect on international investment via an associated set of consistent contemporary policy choices but even after controlling for these associated policy choices egalitarianism continues to exercise a direct effect on cross border investment flows likely through its direct influence on managers daily business conduct

volume autocorrelation information and investor trading this study investigates whether the widely documented daily correlated trading volume of stocks is driven by individual investor trading institutional trading or both we find that at least 95 of nyse and amex stocks exhibit statistically significant positive serial correlation volume autocorrelation decreases with the level of institutional ownership of a stock we also show that the rate of arrivals of new information to the market contributes to the clustering of trades when there is high information flow to the market institutional trading generates a more pronounced effect on volume autocorrelation than individual investor trading our results are broadly consistent with the predictions of trading volume patterns suggested by most theoretical models of stock trading and by empirical research on investor trading

optimizing tracking error constrained portfolios active portfolios subject to tracking error te constraints are the typical setup for active managers tasked with outperforming a benchmark the risk and return relationship of such constrained po

presidential address institutions and culture how and why does distant political and economic history shape the functioning of current institutions this paper argues that individual values and convictions about the scope of application of norms of good conduct provide the missing link evidence from a variety of sources points to two main findings first individual values consistent with generalized as opposed to limited morality are widespread in societies that were ruled by non despotic political institutions in the distant past second well functioning institutions are often observed in countries or regions where individual values are consistent with generalized morality and under different identifying assumptions this suggests a causal effect from values to institutional outcomes the paper ends with a discussion of the implications for future research jel a10 d7 e00

on the strategic behavior of large investors a mean variance portfolio approach abstract one key assumption of markowitz s model is that all traders act as price takers in this paper we extend this mean variance approach in a setting where large investors can move prices instead of having an individual optimization problem we find the investors nash equilibrium and redefine the efficient frontier in this new framework we also develop a simplified application of the general model with two assets and two investors to shed light on the potential strategic behavior of large and atomic investors our findings validate the claim that large investors enhance their portfolio performance in relation to perfect market conditions besides we show under which conditions atomic investors can benefit in relation to the standard setting even if they have not total influence on their eventual performance the two investors two assets setting allows us to quantify performance and do sensitivity analysis regarding investors market power risk tolerance and price elasticity of demand finally for a group of well known etfs we empirically show how price variations change depending on the volume traded we also explain how to set up and use our model with real market data

institutional trades and intraday stock price behavior abstract this paper examines the price effect of institutional stock trading using a unique data set that reports the transactions large and small of 37 large institutional money management firms the direction of each trade and the identity of the management firm behind each trade are known although institutional trades are associated with some price pressure we find that the average effect is small there is also a marked asymmetry between the price impact of buys versus sells we relate our findings to various hypotheses on the elasticity of demand for stocks the cost of executing transactions and the determinants of market impact although market capitalization and relative trade size influence the market impact of a trade the dominant influence is the identity of the money manager behind the trade

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded