robust stochastic discount factors when the market is incomplete a new non redundant derivative security cannot be priced by no arbitrage arguments alone moreover there will be a multiplicity of stochastic discount factors and each of them may give a different price for the new derivative security this paper develops an approach to the selection of a stochastic discount factor for pricing a new derivative security the approach is based on the idea that the price of a derivative security should not vary too much when the payoff of the primitive security is slightly perturbed i e the price of the derivative should be robust to model misspecification the paper develops two metrics of robustness the first is based on robustness in expectation the second is based on robustness in probability and draws on tools from the theory of large deviations we show that in a stochastic volatility model the two metrics yield analytically tractable bounds for the derivative price as the underlying stochastic volatility model is perturbed the bounds can be readily used for numerical examination of the sensitivity of the price of the derivative to model misspecification

the finance growth nexus evidence from bank branch deregulation this paper provides evidence that financial markets can directly affect economic growth by studying the relaxation of bank branch restrictions in the united states we find that the rates of real per capita growth in income and output increase significantly following intrastate branch reform we also argue that the observed changes in growth are the result of changes in the banking system improvements in the quality of bank lending not increased volume of bank lending appear to be responsible for faster growth

forward looking contrast explanation illustrated using the great moderation in reorienting economics lawson introduces the concept of contrast explanation initially defined using the question form why x rather than y where it is a surprising or unexpected outcome that motivates the search for an explanation of the contrast in the following paper i elaborate upon the initial question form asking why the perpetuation of y rather than an alternative possible x this question focuses on relative stability but can be a sceptical or contrarian form from a realist perspective any stability expressed in events as regularity is highly conditional as such underlying the question form is an invitation to explore the instability or vulnerability of order with a view to the ways that order might break down this motivates a forward looking focus of investigation that is particularly appropriate for looking at systemic issues in economics i use the global financial crisis to illustrate the potential here copyright oxford university press

on the recoverability of preferences and beliefs we examine the extent to which an investor s tastes and beliefs can be jointly recovered from knowledge of his her consumption choice more precisely we assume that the investor s preferences admit an expected utility representation but with subjective unknown probabilities and investigate what joint restrictions can be placed on utility functions and beliefs if the investor draws utility from intertemporal consumption we show that the set of utility functions and beliefs that are consistent with a given consumption choice can be characterized by a martingale condition in the markovian case this characterization can be restated in terms of a riccati differential equation that must be satisfied by the investor s relative risk aversion function to each solution of this differential equation is associated a unique utility function and a unique set of beliefs supporting the given consumption choice moreover we show that the differential equation has at most one solution in the class of utility functions displaying infinite absolute risk aversion at the origin thus preferences and associated beliefs can be uniquely recovered within this class article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

ipo post issue markets questionable predilections but diligent learners there appear to be no anomalies in the aftermarket of a sample of 4 848 u s ipos over the period 1975 to 1995 except issues offered below 6 risk is priced in the aftermarket in accordance with rubin stein s asset pricing model unlike under the efficient markets hypothesis emh however market priors about the probability of future default are not unbiased at the ipo date still subsequent learning is rational the market uses bayes law with a correct likelihood function of news given the eventual fate of an issue that is the hypothesis of an efficiently learning market elm cannot be rejected we produce direct evidence in support of these statements based on a new class of tests we also provide indirect evidence by documenting a gradual convergence of ipo prices towards emh as issues mature

optimal convergence trade strategies convergence trades exploit temporary mispricing by simultaneously buying relatively underpriced assets and selling short relatively overpriced assets this paper studies optimal convergence trades under both recurring and nonrecurring arbitrage opportunities represented by continuing and stopped cointegrated price processes and considers both fixed and stochastic poisson horizons conventional long short delta neutral strategies are generally suboptimal and it can be optimal to simultaneously go long or short in two mispriced assets optimal portfolio holdings critically depend on whether the risky asset position is liquidated when prices converge our theoretical results are illustrated on pairs of chinese bank shares traded on both the hong kong and china stock exchanges the author 2013 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

statistical arbitrage and securities prices this article introduces the concept of a statistical arbitrage opportunity sao in a finite horizon economy a sao is a zero cost trading strategy for which i the expected payoff is positive and ii the conditional expected payoff in each final state of the economy is nonnegative unlike a pure arbitrage opportunity a sao can have negative payoffs provided that the average payoff in each final state is nonnegative if the pricing kernel in the economy is path independent then no saos can exist furthermore ruling out saos imposes a novel martingale type restriction on the dynamics of securities prices the important properties of the restriction are that it 1 is model free in the sense that it requires no parametric assumptions about the true equilibrium model 2 can be tested in samples affected by selection biases such as the peso problem and 3 continues to hold when investors beliefs are mistaken the article argues that one can use the new restriction to empirically resolve the joint hypothesis problem present in the traditional tests of the efficient market hypothesis in a fairly general environment this article proposes a novel martingaletype restriction on the dynamics of securities prices this restriction has a number of important properties most notably the restriction may be viewed as model free because it requires no parametric assumptions about the true equilibrium model to derive the restriction we rely on the concept of statistical arbitrage a generalization of pure arbitrage a pure arbitrage opportunity pao is a zero cost trading strategy that offers the possibility of a gain with no possibility of a loss as is well known the existence of paos is incompatible with a competitive equilibrium in asset markets the fundamental theorem of the financial theory establishes a link between the absence of paos and the existence of a positive pricing kernel which supports securities prices while the absence of paos is a necessary condition for any equilibrium model this condition alone often yields pricing implications that are too weak to be practically useful for example when valuing options in incomplete markets the no arbitrage bounds on option prices are typically very wide to strengthen pricing implications several recent articles

takeovers improve firm performance evidence from the banking industry the hypothesis that takeovers provide managers with the incentive to maximize firm value is tested by examining the relationship between profitability and state statutes governing takeover activity among banks the evidence indicates that firms in states with an active takeover market are more profitable when takeover activity is restricted increased use of other mechanisms that provide an incentive to maximize firm value such as concentration of equity ownership and management ownership of stock is observed however these alternative methods have a smaller effect on profitability and do not completely compensate for the absence of an active takeover market

generalized risk premia abstract this paper develops an optimal trading strategy explicitly linked to an agent s preferences and assessment of the distribution of asset returns the price of this strategy is a portfolio of implied moments and its expected excess returns naturally accommodate compensation for higher order moment risk variance risk and the equity premium approximate it to first order and it nests cross sectional asset pricing models such as the linear capital asset pricing model capm an empirical study in the us index market compares the investment behavior of an agent with recursive long run risk preferences to one who merely uses an identically independently distributed time series model and takes market prices as given the two agents exhibit very similar behavior during crises and can be distinguished mostly during calm periods

do 401 k contributions crowd out other personal saving during the late 1980s contributions to 401 k plans eclipsed contributions to individual retirement accounts iras as the leading form of tax deferred individual retirement saving in the united states in this paper we describe patterns of participation in 401 k plans contrast these patterns with ira participation and evaluate the net impact of 401 k contributions on personal saving we find that 401 k participation conditional on eligibility exceeds 60 at all income levels in contrast ira participation at the height of that program rose sharply with income we use two methods to evaluate the net saving effect of 401 k contributions on personal saving we compare the financial assets of families who are eligible for 401 k saving with the assets of those who are not eligible and we consider the change over time in the assets of like groups of savers we find little evidence that 401 k contributions substitute for other forms of personal saving including ira contributions

education and saving the long term effects of high school financial curriculum mandates abstract over the last 40 years a majority of states have adopted consumer education policies and a sizable minority have mandated that high school students receive instruction on topics related to household financial decision making in this paper we attempt to determine whether these mandates have had any effect on subsequent decisions we exploit the variation in requirements both across states and over time to identify the effects of interest the evidence indicates that mandates have raised both exposure to financial curricula and subsequent asset accumulation once exposed students reached adulthood the estimated effects are gradual probably due to implementation lags

participation in and contributions to 401 k pension plans evidence om plan data k plans differ from traditional employer sponsored pension plans in that employees are permitted to make voluntary pre tax contributions hence the sensitivity of participation and contributions to plan charac teristics notably the employer matching rate may play a critical role in retirement saving using plan level data from form 5500s filed annu ally with the internal revenue service ifind that substantial increases occur when an employer moves from a zero to a small or moderately sized match but that at higher match rates employee contributions fall

cumulative prospect theory option returns and the variance premium the variance premium and the pricing of out of the money otm equity index options are major challenges to standard asset pricing models we develop a tractable equilibrium model with cumulative prospect theory cpt preferences that can overcome both challenges the key insight is that the variance premium can be written as the expected return on a portfolio of otm call and put options and the probability weighting feature of cpt can explain the puzzlingly low returns observed for these options using gmm on a sample of u s index option returns between 1996 and 2010 we show that the cpt model ts well observed option prices and therefore the variance premium in a dynamic setting probability weighting and time varying equity return volatility combine to match the observed time series pattern of the variance premium

measuring abnormal performance do stocks overreact abstract a highly controversial issue in financial economies is whether stocks overreact in this paper we find an economically important overreaction effect even after adjusting for size and beta in portfolios formed on the basis of prior five year returns extreme prior losers outperform extreme prior winners by 5 10 per year during the subsequent five years although we find a pronounced january seasonal our evidence suggests that the overreaction effect is distinct from tax loss selling effects interestingly the overreaction effect is substantially stronger for smaller firms than for larger firms returns consistent with the overeaction hypothesis are also observed for short windows around quarterly earnings announcements

the effects of financial education in the workplace evidence from a survey of households abstract we use a novel household survey to investigate the effects of employer based financial education on personal saving we explore cross sectional relations between the availability of employer based financial education and various measures of asset accumulation and we interpret these patterns in light of various potentially confounding factors our findings favor the hypothesis that employer based financial education stimulates saving both in general and for retirement

the behavioral life cycle hypothesis self control mental accounting and framing are incorporated in a behavioral enrichment of the life cycle theory of saving called the behavioral life cycle blc hypothesis the key assumption of the blc theory is that households treat components of their wealth as nonfungible even in the absence of credit rationing specifically wealth is assumed to be divided into three mental accounts current income current assets and future income the temptation to spend is assumed to be greatest for current income and least for future income considerable empirical support for the blc theory is presented primarily drawn from published econometric studies

gain loss and asset pricing we develop an approach to asset pricing in incomplete markets that bridges the gap between the two fundamental approaches in finance model based pricing and pricing by no arbitrage we strengthen the absence of arbtrage assumption by precluding investment opportunities whose attractiveness to a benchmark investor exceeds a specified threshold in our framework the attractiveness of an investment opportunity is measured by the gain loss ratio we show that a restriction on the maximum gain loss ratio is equivalent to a restriction on the ratio of the maximum to minimum values of the pricing kernel by limiting the maximum gainloss ratio we can restrict the admissible set of pricing kernels which in turn allows us to restrict the set of prices that can be assigned to assets we illustrate our methodology by computing price bounds for call options in a black scholes economy without intermediate trading when we vary the maximum permitted gainloss ratio these bounds can range from the exact prices implie

determinants of commercial bank interest margins and profitability using bank level data for 80 countries in the years 1988 9s this article shows that differences in interest margins and bank profitability reflect a variety of determinants bank characteristics macroeconomic conditions explicit and implicit bank taxation deposit insurance regulation overall financial structure and underlying legal and institutional indicators a larger ratio of bank assets to gross domestic product and a lower market concentration ratio lead to lower margins and profits controlling for differences in bank activity leverage and the macroeconomic environment foreign banks have higher margins and profits than domestic banks in developing countries while the opposite holds in industrial countries also there is evidence that the corporate tax burden is fully passed onto bank customers while higher reserve requirements are not especially in developing countries

expectations and learning in iowa we study the rationality of learning and the biases in expectations in the iowa experimental markets using novel tests developed in bossaerts p 1996 martingale restrictions on equilibrium security prices under rational expectations and consistent beliefs caltech working paper bossaerts p 1997 the dynamics of equity prices in fallible markets caltech working paper learning in the iowa winner take all markets is found to be in accordance with the rules of conditional probability bayes law hence participants correctly update their beliefs using the available information there is evidence however that beliefs do not satisfy the restrictions of rational expectations that they reflect the factual distribution of outcomes

statistical arbitrage with default and collateral abstract this paper studies the implications of the absence of statistical arbitrage opportunities in a two period incomplete market economy where default is allowed but there are collateral requirements modified versions of the fundamental theorem of asset pricing are obtained

a new approach to statistical arbitrage strategies based on dynamic factor models of prices and their performance statistical arbitrage strategies are typically based on models of returns we introduce a new statistical arbitrage strategy based on dynamic factor models of prices our objective in this paper is to exploit the mean reverting properties of prices reported in the literature we do so because to capture the same information using a return based factor model a much larger number of lags would be needed leading to inaccurate parameter estimation to empirically test the relative performance of return based and price based models we construct portfolios long short long only and equally weighted based on the forecasts generated by two dynamic factor models using the stock of companies included in the s p 500 index for constructing portfolios the empirical analysis statistically tests the relative forecasting performance using the diebold mariano framework and performing the test for statistical arbitrage proposed by hogan et al 2004 our results show that prices allow for significantly more accurate forecasts than returns and pass the test for statistical arbitrage we attribute this finding to the mean reverting properties of stock prices the high level of forecasting accuracy using price based factor models has important theoretical and practical implications

state passage of interstate banking legislation an analysis of firm legislative and economic characteristics abstract forty nine states and the district of columbia enacted legislation reducing interstate banking restrictions between july 1982 and april 1993 for these 50 banking bills deregulation increased the average price of bank stocks returns vary cross sectionally by firm characteristics regulatory features and economic conditions returns are positively related to the characteristics of acquisition targets furthermore returns are positively related to legislative features that increase the bargaining power of potential targets and economic conditions that are likely to encourage bank acquisition these findings are consistent with the relaxation of geographic restrictions increasing activity in the corporate control market

the role of information and social interactions in retirement plan decisions evidence from a randomized experiment this paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees decisions to enroll in a tax deferred account tda retirement plan within a large university the experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benee ts information fair organized by the university by promising a monetary reward for attendance the experiment multiplied by more than e ve the attendance rate of these treated individuals relative to controls and tripled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated tda enrollment e ve and eleven months after the fair was signie cantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated however the effect on tda enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did we provide three interpretations differential treatment effects social network effects and motivational reward effects to account for these results

corporate performance and managerial remuneration an empirical analysis abstract economic theories of efficient compensation predict a positive relationship between executive pay and corporate performance and yet efforts to document this relationship have been largely unsuccessful in this paper we argue that previous cross sectional studies have omitted important variables which seriously bias their results using data that focus on individual executives over time we find that executive compensation is strongly positively related to corporate performance as measured by shareholder return and growth in firm sales the results are robust to the stock market performance measure utilized

equilibrium warrant pricing models and accounting for executive stock options under apb opinion no 25 compensation expense arising from executive stock options consists of the excess of the market value of the stock over the exercise price of the options on their grant dates if the exercise price equals the market value of the stock on the grant date which is typically the case no compensation expense is recognized this accounting treatment has been frequently criticized for its bias toward underestimating the cost of an option to the issuing firm and a number of alternative valuation models have been suggested in the accounting literature by and large these valuation models have been borrowed from the finance literature where they were developed to explain the pricing of warrants and traded options the purpose of this paper is to assess empirically how well two of these valuation models perform in providing estimates of the value of traded securities warrants that are similar in many respects to executive stock options 2 this evidence should help calibrate the magnitude of the errors

the structure of ownership and the theory of the firm the separation of ownership from control produces a condition where the interests of owner and of ultimate manager may and often do diverge and where many of the checks which formerly operated to limit the use of power disappear in creating these new relationships the quasi public corporation may fairly be said to work a revolution it has divided ownership into nominal ownership and the power formerly joined to it thereby the corporation has changed the nature of profit seeking enterprise 1

do bank regulations affect board independence a cross country analysis abstract based on the hand collected board structure data of 277 listed banks across 55 countries and the bank regulation and supervision database compiled by the world bank this paper provides the first cross country assessment of the impacts of bank regulations on board independence of banks in line with beck et al 2006 we examine the effects of two types of regulation policies the first involving the empowerment of supervisory agencies to monitor and discipline banks directly and the second focusing on encouraging private monitoring of banks through requiring disclosure of more accurate and complete information we find that empowering official supervisory agencies to discipline banks directly reduces board independence but encouraging private sector monitoring of banks increases it the findings suggest that the first type of regulations tends to crowd out the internal governance of banks while the second crowds in it we also find that the legal system with better investor rights protection and better contracts enforcement not only increases board independence but also enhances the crowding in effect of promoting private monitoring and decreases the crowding out effect of direct official supervision on board independence

beyond arbitrage good deal asset price bounds in incomplete markets one often wants to value a risky payoff by reference to prices of other assets rather than by exploiting full fledged economic models however this approach breaks down if one cannot find a perfect replicating portfolio we impose weak economic restriction to derive usefully tight bounds on asset prices in this situation the bounds assume that investors would want to buy assets with high sharpe ratios good deals as well as pure arbitrage opportunities we show how to calculate the price bounds in one period multiperiod and continuous time contexts we show that the multiperiod problem can be solved recursively as a sequence of one period problems we calculate bounds in option pricing examples including infrequent trading and an option written on a nontraded event and we use the bounds to explore the economic significance of option pricing predictions we find that much variation in s p 500 index option prices over time and across strike prices fits within the bounds

the effects of financial education in the workplace evidence from a survey of employers we examine the effects of education on financial decision making skills by identifying an interesting source of variation in pertinent training during the 1990s an increasing number of individuals were exposed to programs of financial education provided by their employers if as some have argued low saving frequently results from a failure to appreciate economic vulnerabilities then education of this form could prove to have a powerful effect on behavior the current paper undertakes an analysis of these programs using a previously unexploited survey of employers we find that both participation in and contributions to voluntary savings plans are significantly higher when employers offer retirement seminars the effect is typically much stronger for non highly compensated employees than for highly compensated employees the frequency of seminars emerges as a particularly important correlate of behavior we are unable to detect any effects of written materials such as newsletters and summary plan descriptions regardless of frequency we also present evidence on other determinants of plan activity