have trading rule profits in the currency markets declined over time abstract previous studies have reported mixed results regarding the success of technical trading rules in currency markets abnormal returns were observed in many studies using data up to the mid 1980s while more recent studies generally report less success for technical trading rules this paper tests whether moving average trading rule profits have declined over the period from 1971 to 2000 if so previous profits may represent a temporary inefficiency that has since been eliminated in the currency markets the hypothesis is tested using 18 exchange rate series over a longer time period than in previous studies rules are optimized for successive 5 year in sample periods from 1971 to 1995 and tested over subsequent 5 year out of sample periods results show that risk adjusted trading rule profits have declined over time from an average of over 3 in the late 1970s and early 1980s to about zero in the 1990s thus market inefficiencies reported in previous studies may have been only temporary inefficiencies

intraday technical trading in the foreign exchange market this paper examines the out of sample performance of intraday technical trading strategies selected using two methodologies a genetic program and an optimized linear forecasting model when realistic transaction costs and trading hours are taken into account we find no evidence of excess returns to the trading rules derived with either methodology thus our results are consistent with market efficiency we do however find that the trading rules discover some remarkably stable patterns in the data

non linear hybrid exchange rate modeling and trading profitability in the foreign exchange market abstract a neuro fuzzy decision making technology is designed and implemented to obtain the optimal daily currency trading rule it is found that a non linear artificial neural network exchange rate microstructure hybrid model combined with a fuzzy logic controller generates a set of trading strategies that earn a higher rate of return compared to the simple buy and hold strategy after accounting for realistic transaction costs the gains from utilizing a dynamic neuro fuzzy model are still present

the use of fundamental and technical analyses by foreign exchange dealers hong kong evidence abstract this article reports the results of a questionnaire survey conducted in february 1995 on the use by foreign exchange dealers in hong kong of fundamental and technical analyses to form their forecasts of exchange rate movements our findings reveal that 85 of respondents rely on both fundamental and technical analyses for predicting future rate movements at different time horizons at shorter horizons there exists a skew towards reliance on technical analysis as opposed to fundamental analysis but the skew becomes steadily reversed as the length of horizon considered is extended technical analysis is considered slightly more useful in forecasting trends than fundamental analysis but significantly more useful in predicting turning points interest rate related news is found to be a relatively important fundamental factor in exchange rate forecasting while moving average and or other trend following systems are the most useful technical technique

sports sentiment and stock returns this paper investigates the stock market reaction to sudden changes in investor mood motivated by psychological evidence of a strong link between soccer outcomes and mood we use international soccer results as our primary mood variable we find a significant market decline after soccer losses for example a loss in the world cup elimination stage leads to a next day abnormal stock return of 49 basis points this loss effect is stronger in small stocks and in more important games and is robust to methodological changes we also document a loss effect after international cricket rugby and basketball games this paper employs a novel mood variable international soccer results to investigate the effect of investor sentiment on asset prices using a cross section of 39 countries we find that losses in soccer matches have an economically and statistically significant negative effect on the losing country s stock market for example elimination from a major international soccer tournament is associated with a next day return on the national stock market index that is 38 basis points lower than average we also document a loss effect after international cricket rugby and basketball games on average the effect is smaller in magnitude for these other sports than for soccer but is still economically and statistically significant we find no evidence of a corresponding effect after wins for any of the sports that we study controlling for the pre game expected outcome we are able to reject the hypothesis that the loss effect after soccer games is driven by economic factors such as reduced productivity or lost revenues we

reconsidering the impact of national soccer results on the ftse 100 in past decades many empirical studies revealed return anomalies in many different asset classes and markets very recent publications have however even found evidence that stock markets react to the results of soccer matches in this article we argue that such empirical studies should be analysed carefully we thus endorse the use of replication studies to verify results consequently by rebuilding the study of ashton et al 2003 we are able to detect mistakes in the empirical set up based on these findings we demonstrate how even minor flaws can have a crucial influence on the results of such studies and point out pitfalls that are frequently encountered we furthermore emphasize the importance of robustness checks to validate the results of empirical studies

a variance ratio test of random walks in foreign exchange rates the separate variance ratio tests under homoscedasticity and heteroscedasticity both provide evidence rejecting the random walk hypothesis using five pairs of weekly nominal exchange rate series over the period from august 7 1974 to march 29 1989 the rejections cast doubt on the random walk hypothesis in exchange rates which has received support in the existing literature furthermore since the rejections are robust to heteroscedasticity they suggest autocorelations of weekly increments in the nominal exchange rate series which may be consistent with the exchange rate overshooting or undershooting phenomenon in the past decade there has been a consensus that nominal exchange rates follow a random walk process since a unit root and uncorrelated increments are both required for a random walk process the random walk is usually supported in the existing literature either because a unit root component is detected in the exchange rate series or because the increment in the exchange rate is found to be serially uncorrelated for example meese and singleton 1982 and baillie and bollerslev 1989 both find a unit root component in the exchange rate series and the evidence provided in giddy and dufey 1975 cornell and dietrich 1978 logue sweeney and willett 1978 and hsieh 1988 all suggest that the exchange rate series contains uncorrelated increments in this paper the random walk hypothesis for the nominal exchange rate series is reexamined by applying a variance ratio test developed in lo and mackinlay 1988 to five pairs of weekly nominal exchange rate series over the period from august 7 1974 to march 29 1989 while there are two implications of the random walk unit root and uncorrelated increments this paper focuses on the uncorrelated increments aspect this is not only because there are some important departures from the random walk that unit root test cannot detect but also because the autocorrelation aspect may yield

inflation targeting in brazil constructing credibility under exchange rate volatility abstract this paper assesses the challenges faced by the inflation targeting regime in brazil the inflation targeting framework has played a critical role in macroeconomic stabilization we stress two important challenges construction of credibility and exchange rate volatility the estimations indicate the following results i the inflation targets have worked as an important coordinator of expectations ii the central bank has reacted strongly to inflation expectations iii there has been a reduction in the degree of inflation persistence and iv the exchange rate pass through for administered or monitored prices is two times higher than for market prices

exchange traded funds a new investment option for taxable investors exchange traded funds etfs are a new variety of mutual fund that first became available in 1993 etfs have grown rapidly and now hold nearly 80 billion in assets etfs are sometimes described as more tax efficient than traditional equity mutual funds since in recent years some large etfs have made smaller distributions of realized and taxable capital gains than most mutual funds this paper provides an introduction to the operation of exchange traded funds it also compares the pre tax and post tax returns on the largest etf the spdr trust that invests in the s p500 with the returns on the largest equity index fund the vanguard index 500 the results suggest that between 1994 and 2000 the before and after tax returns on the spdr trust and this mutual fund were very similar both the after tax and the pre tax returns on the fund were slightly greater than those on the etf these findings suggest that etfs offer taxable investors a method of holding broad baskets of stocks that deliver returns comparable to those of low cost index funds this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

who pays the bar tab beer consumption and economic growth in the united states what drug provides americans with the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain the answer hands down is alcohol the pain comes not only from drunk driving and lost lives but also addiction family strife crime violence poor health and squandered human potential young and old drinkers and abstainers alike all are affected every american is paying for alcohol abuse phillip j cook paying the tab the costs and benefits of alcohol control 2007 i introduction alcohol consumption has severe social and economic consequences lost productivity disability early death crime family neglect personality deterioration to name a few cook 2007 at the individual level the effects of alcohol consumption have been explored considerably by researchers in different fields including economics medicine public health criminology and sociology however few studies have examined the economic impact of alcohol use at the aggregate level probably due to the research deficiency regarding its aggregate effects some disagreement exists about the overall net benefits of alcohol use on the one hand scholars who have done extensive research on individual outcomes claim that the overall costs of alcohol use outweigh its benefits for example cook and moore 2002 120 state in their review article the production and sale of alcoholic beverages account for a small share of national product in the united states and in other advanced economies however the deleterious effects of alcohol consumption on health and safety constitute a substantial economic burden reducing our overall standard of living on the other hand organizations formed by the producers and distributors of alcoholic beverages claim that the alcoholic beverage industry contributes significantly to the u s economy through job creation and tax revenues according to beer serves america 2011 an organization sponsored by the beer institute and the national beer wholesalers association nbwa directly and indirectly the beer industry employs approximately 1 8 million americans paying them over 71 billion in wages and benefits the industry pays over 44 billion in business personal and consumption taxes including 5 3 billion in excise taxes and 5 8 billion in sales gross receipts and other taxes 1 similarly the distilled spirits council of the united states discus 1999 the national trade association representing america s leading distillers and about 70 of all distilled spirits brands sold in the united states states that the alcohol beverage industry is a major contributor to the u s economy through job creation wages and taxes 2 room and jernigan 2000 point out that the benefits reaped from the alcohol industry in terms of economic development should be weighed against the negative impacts on economic development in addition to public health they go on to say that alcohol s contribution to total production can vary tremendously from country to country generating 3 of total manufacturing value added in argentina or the netherlands but as little as 0 07 in iran aside from the aforementioned contributions of the alcohol industry to the economy often cited by the industry itself supply side efforts also play a role in the consumption of alcohol this can be done through influencing government regulation of the market for alcohol and selling cheap alcohol in bulk which has a devastating public health impact stockwell and crosbie 2001 indeed the economic burden of excessive alcohol consumption has been found to be substantial recently estimated at 223 5 billion bouchery et al 2011 although a few studies have examined the impact of macroeconomic conditions on drinking prevalence and patterns such as those by ruhm and black 2002 and ruhm 1995 we are not aware of any studies exploring the impact of alcohol consumption on economic growth

stock market returns a note on temperature anomaly this study investigates whether stock market returns are related to temperature research in psychology has shown that temperature significantly affects mood and mood changes in turn cause behavioral changes evidence suggests that lower temperature can lead to aggression while higher temperature can lead to both apathy and aggression aggression could result in more risk taking while apathy could impede risk taking we therefore expect lower temperature to be related to higher stock returns and higher temperature to be related to higher or lower stock returns depending on the trade off between the two competing effects we examine many stock markets world wide and find a statistically significant negative correlation between temperature and returns across the whole range of temperature apathy dominates aggression when temperature is high the observed negative correlation is robust to alternative tests and retains its statistical significance after controlling for various known anomalies

consequences of participant inattention with an application to carbon taxes for meat products despite widespread use in nonmarket valuation data quality remains an ongoing challenge for survey methods one key concern is whether participants attentively respond to survey questions or whether they exert less than full effort to determine the prevalence and consequences of inattention bias in surveys we estimate how meat demand varies across people who do and do not miss trap questions using a split sample design with discrete choice experiments for meat products we explore three different trap questions to determine how many potentially inattentive respondents are identified by each method we find that individuals who miss trap questions respond differently to the choice experiment than individuals who correctly answer the trap question inattention generates vastly different compensating variation estimates of a carbon tax ranging from 3 56 cents per meal choice for the least attentive to 6 13 cents per meal choice for the most attentive

inferred vs stated attribute non attendance in choice experiments a study of doctors prescription behaviour abstract it is increasingly recognised that respondents to choice experiments employ heuristics such as attribute non attendance ana to simplify the choice tasks this paper develops an econometric model which incorporates preference heterogeneity among respondents and allows the probability of non attendance to depend on the respondents stated non attendance we find evidence that stated ana is a useful indicator of the prevalence of non attendance in the data contrary to previous papers in the literature we find that estimates of marginal rates of substitution derived from models which account for ana are similar to the standard logit estimates

market efficiency of brazilian exchange rate evidence from variance ratio statistics and technical trading rules abstract this study utilizes the variance ratio test to examine the behavior of brazilian exchange rate we show that adjustments for multiple tests and a bootstrap methodology must be employed in order to avoid size distortions we propose a block bootstrap scheme and show that it has much nicer properties than the traditional chow denning chow k v denning k c 1993 a simple multiple variance ratio test journal of econometrics 58 3 385 401 multiple variance ratio tests overall the method proposed in the paper provides evidence refuting the random walk behavior for the brazilian exchange rate for long investment horizon but consistent with the random walk hypothesis for short run horizon additionally we also test for the predictive power of variable moving average vma and trading range break trb technical rules and find evidence of forecasting ability for these rules nonetheless the excess return that can be obtained from such rules is not significant suggesting that such predictability is not economically significant

are choice experiments incentive compatible a test with quality differentiated beef steaks this study compares hypothetical and nonhypothetical responses to choice experiment questions we test for hypothetical bias in a choice experiment involving beef ribeye steaks with differing quality attributes in general hypothetical responses predicted higher probabilities of purchasing beef steaks than nonhypothetical responses thus hypothetical choices overestimate total willingness to pay for beef steaks however marginal willingness to pay for a change in steak quality is in general not statistically different across hypothetical and actual payment settings

international evidence on the robustness of the day of the week effect consistent with connolly s 1989 1991 evidence this study finds that sample size and or error term adjustments render u s day of the week effects statistically insignificant in contrast day of the week effects in seven european countries and in canada and hong kong are robust to individual sample size or error term adjustments and day of the week effects in five european countries survive the simultaneous imposition of both types of adjustments in most countries where day of the week effects are robust however the effects are statistically significant in not more than two weeks out of the month these findings are inconsistent with explanations of the day of the week effect based on institutional differences or on the arrival of new information thus in the absence of other potential explanations already dismissed by jaffe and westerfield 1985 evidence in this study further complicates the international day of the week effect puzzle

stock return seasonalities and earnings information previous literature documents significant seasonalities in stock market returns one explanation is seasonality in earnings information if true a return index comprised solely of firms reporting earnings should exhibit stronger intertemporal seasonalities than a return index comprised of firms not reporting earnings employing all new york and american stock exchange firms over six years this study examines the seasonality of stock returns generally seasonal patterns for reporting returns are found to be similar to or slightly weaker than for nonreporting returns thus it is doubtful that earnings news seasonality induces stock return seasonality

the efficiency of financial futures markets tests of prediction accuracy abstract the prices of financial futures contracts can be interpreted as forecasts of the spot rates which will apply at the final delivery date of that contract financial futures contracts have been traded daily since the early 1980s and provide a substantial bank of data to test the forecasting efficiency of such contracts tests are carried out to examine whether the interest rates implied by the futures price for eurodollar and short sterling contracts are cointegrated with the final settlement price over forecasting horizons of 1 2 and 3 months similar analysis is carried out for the yen dollar exchange rate futures contract the paper then examines the forecasting performance of the three contracts over the forecasting horizons of 1 2 and 3 months and in particular whether the forecasts implied by the futures contract provide better predictions than the naive no change i e random walk a vector error correction model vecm or an arima model an examination of the relative efficiency of the markets for the three markets over the three time horizons is carried out and finally trading strategies are simulated to see whether excess profits can be achieved in fact the results suggest that both profits and losses would be attracted

fear anger and credit on bank robberies and loan conditions we study the impact of emotions on real world decisions made by loan officers by analyzing the loan conditions of loans granted immediately after a bank branch robbery we find significant differences in conditions of the loans granted after a robbery compared to changes in loan conditions that occur contemporaneously at unaffected branches in general loan officers seem to adopt so called avoidance behaviour in accordance with the literature on posttraumatic stress their avoidance behavior is halved within two weeks after the robbery and the effect further varies depending on the presence of a firearm during the robbery

do euro exchange rates follow a martingale some out of sample evidence abstract traditional autocorrelation and variance ratio tests are based on serial uncorrelatedness rather than martingale difference as such they do not capture potential nonlinearity in mean which could lead to misleading inferences in favor of the martingale hypothesis this paper employs various parametric and nonparametric nonlinear models as well as several model comparison criteria to examine the potential martingale behavior of euro exchange rates in the context of out of sample forecasts the overall evidence indicates that while martingale behavior cannot be rejected for euro exchange rates with major currencies such as the japanese yen british pound and us dollar there is nonlinear predictability in terms of economic criteria with respect to several smaller currencies

a discrete choice model with endogenous attribute attendance abstract this paper develops a discrete choice model in which the decision to consider an attribute in the choice process is modelled endogenously in an application to patients choice of general practitioner it is found that the proposed model outperforms the standard logit model in terms of goodness of fit and produces substantially different estimates of willingness to pay

patterns in stock market movements tested as random number generators this paper shows that tests of random number generators rngs may be used to test the efficient market hypothesis emh it uses the overlapping serial test ost a standard test in rng research to detect anomalous patterns in the distribution of sequences of stock market movements up and down our results show that most stock markets exhibit idiosyncratic recurrent patterns contrary to the efficient market hypothesis also that ost detects a different kind of non randomness to standard econometric long and short memory tests exposure of these anomalies should contribute to making markets more efficient

mood firm behavior and aggregate economic outcomes abstract this study examines whether mood affects the aggregate state level macroeconomy through its impact on firm level decisions using sky cloud cover as a proxy for mood we show that mood affects the economic expectations of small business managers after relatively sunnier periods managers have more optimistic expectations and the component of their expectations related to mood influences hiring and investment decisions consequently mood affects state level job creation and new business starts especially during periods of greater economic uncertainty these results suggest that mood induced economic expectations influence firm level managerial decisions and state level macroeconomic fluctuations

are stock returns predictable a test using markov chains this paper uses a markov chain model to test the random walk hypothesis of stock prices given a time series of returns a markov chain is defined by letting one state represent high returns and the other represent low returns the random walk hypothesis restricts the transition probabilities of the markov chain to be equal irrespective of the prior years annual real returns are shown to exhibit significant nonrandom walk behavior in the sense that low high returns tend to follow runs of high low returns in the postwar period

beating the foreign exchange market filter rule profits found in foreign exchange markets in the early days of the current managed float persist in later periods as shown by statistical tests developed and implemented here the test is consistent with but independent of a wide variety of asset pricing models the profits found cannot be explained by risk if risk premia are constant over time inclusion of the home foreign interest rate differential in computing profits has little effect on the comparison of filter returns to those of buy and hold in the early years of the generalized managed floating that began in march 1973 filter rule profits in excess of buy and hold were found for many countries logue sweeney and willett 18 dooley and shafer 6 cornell and dietrich 5 it was unclear however whether such profits indicated inefficiencies first it was not clear that risk was adequately handled in such tests and often risk was ignored second there was no evidence such profits would be available postsample and third there was no statistical test of the significance of these profits this paper uses the logic of risk return tradeoffs to analyze the role of risk in such tests and illustrates the logic in a discussion using the sharpe lintner capital asset pricing model capm although a breeden consumption based capm a merton intertemporal capm or an arbitrage pricing model apm could easily be used the paper develops a test of statistical significance appropriate to foreign exchange markets section i analyzing the rate of return on foreign exchange speculation less the foreign domestic interest rate differential the test explicitly assumes that risk premia are constant over the sample the excess rates of return observable in using filters in going from a risk free dollar asset to a risk free deutsche mark dm asset persist into the 1980 s section ii and this is true even when taking account of transactions costs it turns out that these results for the dm case do not depend very much on the interestrate differential but primarily on exchange rate behavior this is useful to know because it is often quite difficult to find matching interest rate data of high quality for a sample of nine other currencies using only exchange rates section iii shows that the excess returns made in the first 610 days of the float persist in the next 1 220 days into the 1980 s dooley and shafer 7 find similar persistence in experiments that do not use buy and hold and have no significance tests when filter rule profits have been found in spot exchange markets it has often been argued that the profits are due to risk this paper uses the capm to analyze rates of return both to buy and hold and to filter strategies it turns out that the claremont mckenna college and claremont graduate school arthur d warga douglas joines and thomas d willett offered helpful comments and ning ning koo provided research assistance

stated and revealed preferences for organic and cloned milk combining choice experiment and scanner data the u s food and drug administration s recent announcement that milk from cloned cows is as safe to drink as that from conventionally bred cows prompted interest among farmers food retailers and regulators in the market impacts of the introduction of milk from clones because milk from cloned animals is not currently labeled in the market we utilized a stated preference experiment to determine consumer preferences for the attribute but also sought to determine whether the survey based choices were consistent with people s revealed preferences given by scanner data our analysis indicates that a pooled model combining stated and revealed preference data exhibits overall better out of sample prediction performance than either data set used alone results from the pooled model indicate that consumers are willing to pay large premiums to avoid milk from cloned cows an amount that is over three times that for organic or rbst free milk the results are used to calculate the value of a mandatory labeling program

how closely do hypothetical surveys and laboratory experiments predict field behavior we compare the ability of three preference elicitation methods hypothetical choices nonhypothetical choices and nonhypothetical rankings and three discrete choice econometric models the multinomial logit mnl the independent availability logit ial and the random parameter logit rpl to predict actual retail shopping behavior in three different product categories ground beef wheat flour and dishwashing liquid overall we find a high level of external validity our specific results suggest that the nonhypothetical elicitation approaches especially the nonhypothetical ranking method outperformed the hypothetical choice experiment in predicting retail sales we also find that the rpl can have superior predictive performance but that the mnl predicts equally well in some circumstances experiment

good day sunshine stock returns and the weather psychological evidence and casual intuition predict that sunny weather is associated with upbeat mood this paper examines the relationship between morning sunshine in the city of a country s leading stock exchange and daily market index returns across 26 countries from 1982 to 1997 sunshine is strongly significantly correlated with stock returns after controlling for sunshine rain and snow are unrelated to returns substantial use of weather based strategies was optimal for a trader with very low transactions costs however because these strategies involve frequent trades fairly modest costs eliminate the gains these findings are difficult to reconcile with fully rational price setting

do hypothetical and actual marginal willingness to pay differ in choice experiments application to the valuation of the environment abstract in this paper we test the validity of choice experiments with donations for environmental projects in particular we test whether or not there are differences in preferences between a hypothetical and an actual choice experiment our experiments indicate no differences in addition internal tests of validity indicate transitive and stable preferences in both experiments although there are some indications of possible learning effects during the experiment

stock prices and volume the authors undertake a comprehensive investigation of price and volume co movement using daily new york stock exchange data from 1928 to 1987 they adjust the data to take into account well known calendar effects and long run trends to describe the process they use a seminonparametric estimate of the joint density of current price change and volume conditional on past price changes and volume four empirical regularities are found 1 positive correlation between conditional volatility and volume 2 large price movements are followed by high volume 3 conditioning on lagged volume substantially attenuates the leverage effect and 4 after conditioning on lagged volume there is a positive risk return relation article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the pitch rather than the pit investor inattention trading activity and fifa world cup matches this paper analyzes stock market trading in 15 countries during the 2010 and 2014 soccer fifa world cups we find evidence for substantial investor inattention during these major sporting events the lack of attention for the trading pit is particularly large when the national soccer team is competing with traded volumes declining by as much as 48 during national team matches prices on local stock markets can temporarily decouple from global financial market developments these findings suggest that major sporting events can act as a laboratory in which to investigate investor inattention

releasing the trap a method to reduce inattention bias in survey data with application to u s beer taxes this study uses discrete choice experiments to explore the efficacy of prompts targeted at reducing inattention bias upon receiving feedback inattentive respondents are given the opportunity to reanswer a so called trap question that checks for attentiveness we find that individuals who miss trap questions and do not correctly revise their responses have significantly different choice patterns as compared to individuals who correctly answer the trap question adjusting for these inattentive responses has a substantive impact on policy impacts results based on attentive participant responses indicate that a minimum beer price would have to be substantial to substantially reduce beer demand jel c83 q18 q51

nonlinearity data snooping and stock index etf return predictability abstract this paper examines daily return predictability for eighteen international stock index etfs the out of sample tests are conducted based on linear and various popular nonlinear models and both statistical and economic criteria for model comparison the main results show evidence of predictability for six of eighteen etfs a simple linear autoregression model and a nonlinear in variance garch model but not several popular nonlinear in mean models help outperform the martingale model the allowance of data snooping bias using white s reality check also substantially weakens otherwise apparently strong predictability

the asian crisis and calendar effects on stock returns in thailand abstract this paper systematically examines daily returns of the thai stock market index to determine whether there is evidence of calendar effects due to the day of the week the month of the year days before or after holidays and within month effects particular attention is given to the evidence of these anomalies prior to during and after the asian crisis most of the previous empirical evidence examines each of these effects in isolation the approach adopted within this paper is to start with a general model which incorporates a range of different calendar anomalies before estimating the conditional volatility models daily data from 3rd january 1995 to 29th december 2000 are used for estimation providing 1473 observations the final models are tested by comparing their forecast performance for 2001 244 observations with various models which do not include calendar effects the conclusion is that the inclusion of calendar effects improves the forecast accuracy

trading rule profits in european currency spot cross rates abstract the moving average ma trading rule is applied to six european spot cross rates jy bp dm bp jy dm sf dm sf bp and jy sf to see if opportunities for profitable trading exist the results suggest that ma trading rules are marginally profitable only for the jy dm and the jy sf cross rates while trading rules are not profitable for the other four cross rates bootstrapping and out of sample tests provide similar results examination of subsamples characterized by central bank intervention do not produce different results computation of box pierce statistics adjusted for heteroscedasticity show that daily returns for all six cross rates are serially uncorrelated overall the results suggests that cross rates are sufficiently transparent to eliminate ma trading rule profit

winter blues a sad stock market cycle and god said let there be light and there was light and god saw that the light was good genesis 1 3 depression has been linked with seasonal affective disorder sad a condition that affects many people during the seasons of relatively fewer hours of daylight experimental research in psychology has documented a clear link between depression and lowered risktaking behavior in a wide range of settings including those of a financial nature through the links between sad and depression and between depression and risk aversion seasonal variation in length of day can translate into seasonal variation in equity returns based on supportive evidence from psychology which suggests sad is linked closely with hours of daylight we consider stock market index data from countries at various latitudes and on both sides of the equator we model differences in the seasonal variation of daylight across coun

the wandering weekday effect in major stock markets this paper reports a wandering weekday effect the pattern of day seasonality in stock market returns is not fixed as assumed in the monday or weekend effects but changes over time analysing daily closing prices in eleven major stock markets during 1993 2007 our results show that the wandering weekday is not conditional on average returns in the previous week the twist in the monday effect nor does it diminish through the period of analysis the results have important implications for market efficiency and help to reconcile mixed findings in previous studies including the reported disappearance of the weekday effect in recent years

high stock returns before holidays existence and evidence on possible causes on the trading day prior to holidays stocks advance with disproportionate frequency and show high mean returns averaging nine to fourteen times the mean return for the remaining days of the year over one third of the total return accruing to the market portfolio over the 1963 1982 period was earned on the eight trading days which each year fall before holiday market closings examination of hourly pre holiday stock returns reveals high returns throughout the day pre holiday stock returns in the post test 1983 1986 period are also examined this paper explores a seeming empirical regularity in the pattern of daily stock index returns surrounding holidays the trading day prior to holidays on average exhibits high positive returns over one third of the return earned by the market over the twenty year test period accrued on the eight trading days which annually fall before holidays intimations of the pre holiday strength have appeared in the academic literature in an examination of the frequency of dow jones industrial average advances on days surrounding weekends during the 1901 to 1932 period fields 1934 finds a disproportionate frequency of advances on trading days preceding long holiday weekends roll 1983a finds high returns accruing to small firms on the trading day prior to new year s day lakonishok and smidt 1984 note that prices also rise in all deciles of market capitalization on the last trading day before christmas and conclude that the high christmas returns of large companies might be considered another mystery a number of stock market advisors have also noted the pre holiday strength merrill 1966 finds a disproportionate frequency of dow jones industrial average advances on days preceding holidays during the 1897 to 1965 period and fosback 1976 has noted high preholiday returns in sp further hourly returns and closing bid ask data are examined to determine when high returns accrue on preholidays tests are also conducted showing that pre holiday strength is not

direct foreign ownership institutional investors and firm characteristics in this paper we characterize foreign ownership using a dataset of ownership and attributes of swedish rms the analysis reveals that foreigners show a preference for large rms rms paying low dividends and rms with large cash positions on their balance sheets when we further analyze the preference for large rms we nd that market liquidity and presence in international markets measured through export sales or listings on other exchanges seem to characterize foreign holdings better than rm size alone foreigners also tend to underweight rms with a dominant owner importantly we demonstrate that most of the features associated with foreign ownership are driven by the fact that foreign investors typically are mutual funds or other institutional investors hence we identify an institutional investor bias rather than a foreign investor bias finally using ownership data on a country level we conclude that the results are particularly strong among u s investors who comprise the largest institutions among foreign investors 2001 elsevier science s a all rights reserved jel classixcation g1 g15

some evidence of random walk behavior of euro exchange rates using ranks and signs abstract this study utilises recently developed tests based on ranks and signs in addition to the traditional variance ratio test to examine the behavior of euro exchange rates we show that adjustments for multiple tests must be employed in order to avoid size distortions overall such adjustments provide evidence consistent with random walk behavior of euro exchange rates

the economics of urban afforestation insights from an integrated bioeconomic health model abstract urban afforestation programs are starting to act on the growing body of evidence that nature and greenspace are important determinants of well being however there are a lack of credible investigations into the long term returns on investment of afforestation inclusive of positive and negative externalities project related costs and dynamic environmental feedbacks using the new york city forest canopy as an example our integrated bioeconomic health model illustrates that investments in afforestation produce per planted tree net benefits that are significantly lower than previous similarly comparable estimates 12 vs 172 and are nonlinear in canopy size we also show that a reduction in urban air quality such as those that may be produced by changes in national air quality policies and enforcement can be mitigated through increased investment in urban afforestation our results have significant public policy implications for urban environmental quality initiatives

forest loss and economic inequality in the solomon islands using small area estimation to link environmental change to welfare outcomes abstract to study welfare effects of environmental change data from household surveys may be linked to remote sensing data using spatial aggregation to link risks ecological fallacy since surveys are usually representative for areas larger than the spatial scale of decision making units this paper uses survey to census imputation to estimate welfare indicators for small areas to study the effect of deforestation on subsequent inequality in the rural solomon islands this country depends on logging for almost half of foreign exchange and one sixth of government revenue and most forested land remains under customary ownership a sharp increase in log exports to seven times the sustainable yield and a major shift in export destinations as other countries withdrew from the tropical log trade represents an exogenous shock that helps to identify effects of deforestation on inequality rather than the reverse relationship a standard deviation increase in the rate of forest loss over 2000 to 2012 raises the gini index of inequality in 2013 by one third of a standard deviation mean incomes and poverty rates are also higher implying that deforestation makes some households richer while others become poorer these precisely estimated effects would be obscured using more spatially aggregated data

effects of cheap talk on consumer willingness to pay for golden rice a large body of literature suggests willingness to pay is overstated in hypothetical valuation questions as compared to when actual payment is required recently cheap talk has been proposed to eliminate the potential bias in hypothetical valuation questions cheap talk refers to process of explaining hypothetical bias to individuals prior to asking a valuation question this study explores the effect of cheap talk in a mass mail survey using a conventional value elicitation technique results indicate that cheap talk was effective at reducing willingness to pay for most survey participants however consistent with previous research cheap talk did not reduce willingness to pay for knowledgeable consumers

exploitable predictable irrationality the fifa world cup effect on the u s stock market in a recently published paper edmans garcia and norli 2007 reveal a strong association between results of soccer games and local stock returns inspired by their work we propose a novel approach to exploit this effect on the aggregate international level with the following three unique features i the aggregate effect does not depend on the games results hence the effect is an exploitable predictable effect ii the aggregate effect is based on many games hence it is very large and highly significant we find that the average return on the u s market over the world cup s effect period is 2 58 compared to 1 21 for all days average returns over the same period length iii exploiting the aggregate effect is involved with trading in a single index for a relatively long period

turn of month evaluations of liquid profits and stock returns a common explanation for the monthly and january effects this paper presents and tests a hypothesis that the standardization of payments in the united states at the turn of each calendar month generally induces a surge in stock returns at the turn of each calendar month the hypothesis also asserts that returns generally will be greater following the month of december and will vary inversely with the stringency of monetary policy empirical results using stock index returns for 19691986 support the hypothesis this analysis provides an explanation for the previously documented monthly effect in stock returns and a partial explanation for the january effect in a recent paper ariel 1987 documents an important empirical regularity in stock returns and terms it the monthly effect using value weighted and equally weighted daily stock index returns for the period 1963 1981 ariel shows that virtually all of the cumulative return on these indexes is realized on ten consecutive trading days of the calendar month beginning with the last trading day of the month and extending through the first nine trading days of the following month ariel considers various explanations for this phenomenon but none sufficed to explain the observed empirical regularity p 174 more recently lakonishok and smidt 1988 examine returns on the dow jones industrial average index for the period 1897 1986 and find that significant mean daily returns are realized consistently on only four consecutive trading days of the calendar month beginning with the last trading day of the month these trading days will henceforth be referred to as the turn of month trading days ariel s and lakonishok and smidt s tests indicate that the monthly effect is not merely another manifestation of the previously documented january effect rozeff and kinney 1976 first documented that average stock index returns in january are higher than in any other month keim 1983 and others find that the surge in january returns is largely confined to stocks of small firms and to the first few trading days in january branch 1977 and others have suggested that the surge in january returns is due to year end tax loss selling and subsequent repurchases in january studies by roll 1983 reinganum 1983 ritter 1988 and others provide evidence consistent with the tax loss selling

does forest loss increase human disease evidence from nigeria it is estimated that about one quarter of the global disease burden in terms of healthy life years lost and about one quarter of all premature deaths can be attributed to modifiable environmental factors pruss ustun and corvalan 2006 three infectious diseases diarrhea respiratory infections and malaria account for the largest absolute burden in developing countries with children facing the greatest impacts there is a growing body of evidence demonstrating the health burden of air and water pollution as well as important productivity and income effects see for example reviews of the literature in pattanayak and pfaff 2009 and greenstone and jack 2016 studies that focus on the impacts of natural resource degradation are fewer notably garg 2016 provides the first causal estimates of the impact of sustained forest cover on reduced malarial incidence in indonesia demonstrating a large and previously understudied cost of forest cover loss in this paper we extend this new literature on the health impacts of environmental degradation by estimating the causal impact of forest loss on infectious disease incidence in young children using temporal and spatial variation in the last decade in nigeria our estimation strategy involves geolinking a new high resolution dataset of global forest change to child level health data from the nigeria demographic and health surveys from 2008 and 2013 we find that forest loss significantly increases the incidence of malaria though it does not affect the incidence of diarrhea and respiratory diseases the impact of forest loss on malaria is large one standard deviation of forest loss increases malaria incidence by around 4 5 percent in children under five and the dynamic pattern of the impact suggests a temporary ecological disturbance consistent with findings in garg 2016 and the tropical medicine literature

the day of the week effects on the volatility the role of the asymmetry in this paper we propose to evaluate whether asymmetry influences the day of the week effects on volatility we also investigate empirically the impact of the day of the week effect in major international stock markets using garch family models from a forecast framework indeed the existence of calendar effects might be interesting only if their incorporation in a model results in better volatility forecasts

nonsecular regularities in returns and volume this study addressed u s stock daily returns and volume around days when the market is open that correspond to religious or cultural occasions specifically st patrick s day and the jewish high holy days of rosh hashanah and yom kippur on rosh hashanah and yom kippur volume was found to be down relative to volume on all trading days in the sample the reason may be that the nonfinancial opportunity cost of trading is high for a considerable number of traders on these days returns were significantly higher on the days preceding st patrick s day and rosh hashanah which is consistent with the notion that market returns reflect the festive nature of these occasions evidence was also found of significantly negative returns after yom kippur in the second half of the sample period which accords with the idea that the market reflects the solemn nature of this occasion overall the results are consistent with the view that mood is a viable explanation for some market movements

linear non linear and essential foreign exchange rate prediction with simple technical trading rules abstract this paper investigates the predictability of spot foreign exchange rate returns from past buy sell signals of the simple technical trading rules by using the nearest neighbors and the feedforward network regressions the optimal choices for nearest neighbors hidden units in a feedforward network and the training set are determined by the cross validation method which minimizes the mean square error although this method is computationally expensive the results indicate that it has the advantage of avoiding overfitting in noisy environments and indicate that simple technical rules provide significant forecast improvements for the current returns over the random walk model

stock return comovement around the dow jones islamic market world index revisions we examine patterns of comovement in stock returns around the dow jones islamic market world index djimwi quarterly revision events our analysis is based on a sample of 8250 companies from eighteen countries during the period may 1999 june 2012 we find that a stock s comovement with the djimwi increases when it joins and decreases when it leaves the index we also find that the comovement of newly added deleted stocks with the existing djimwi constituents increases declines during periods of high trading activity and during the month of ramadan further tests reveal that changes in the fundamentals have no impact on the comovements of added and deleted stocks overall our results indicate that stock returns respond to the emotional state of investors around information free events

implications of nonlinear dynamics for financial risk management this paper demonstrates that when log price changes are not iid their conditional density may be more accurate than their unconditional density for describing short term behavior using the bds test of independence and identical distribution daily log price changes in four currency futures contracts are found to be not iid while there appear to be no predictable conditional mean changes conditional variances are predictable and can be described by an autoregressive volatility model that seems to capture all the departures from independence and identical distribution based on this model daily log price changes are decomposed into a predictable part which is described parametrically by the autoregressive volatility model and an unpredictable part which can be modeled by an empirical density either parametrically or nonparametrically this two step seminonparametric method yields a conditional density for daily log price changes which has a number of uses in financial risk management

the flexibility of the workweek in the united states evidence from the fifa world cup i introduction at any given time an american worker should benefit from some flexibility in his workweek schedule there are events whose timing overlaps with the workday and if these events are valued by the worker consuming them will increase the quality of the worker s leisure the possibility to reschedule his work hours and consume a given event will result in higher worker s utility perhaps the worker knows ahead of time when this event will occur and plans accordingly for example during the national collegiate athletic association ncaa tournaments in march saint patrick s day also in march or the presidential inauguration in january alternatively the worker will equally benefit from some work flexibility in the face of an event that is unpredictable such as bad weather a natural disaster or a sick child at home even though weekly schedule flexibility is important and valued by workers it is not clear whether workers adjust their work schedule in the face of an event that overlaps with the workday especially if consuming the event results in higher workers utility while workers weekly schedule flexibility has remained relatively unexplored economists have paid considerable attention to the market hours of american workers for example costa 2000 analyzes the evolution of the workday length of the average american male between 1890 and 1991 coleman and pencavel 1993a 1993b analyze the evolution of hours worked by american workers between 1940 and 1988 and kuhn and lozano 2008 analyze the evolution of the length of the workweek of american workers between 1979 and 2006 similarly economists have been interested in understanding the tradeoff between leisure and paid labor recent research includes connolly 2008 who shows that weather determines a worker s day to day allocation of market hours as workers work longer hours during rainy days or gonzalez chapela 2007 who shows that as prices of recreation goods complements of leisure increase american workers hours of work increase as well a natural extension is to ask whether workers would decrease their hours of labor in the face of an event that overlaps with the workweek if workers value of leisure increases from consuming such event then it is conceivable that they would choose to consume it rather than work at the time of the event in this paper i explore the workweek s schedule flexibility of american workers during the last 15 years using the exogenous variation that arises due to the format of fifa soccer world cup 1 that is unlike events that cater to the american public and may be scheduled at times when americans reduce their work hours anyway the world cup game schedule and host country choice is determined mostly independently from the united states labor market or the preferences of american workers further as each world cup is hosted by a different country and played every 4 years the time games are broadcast live in america may or may not overlap with the workday depending on the host country where the world cup is played this allows me to estimate the causal effect that the world cup has on changes in a worker s weekly schedule flexibility from three independent sources of variation across time comparing year t with year t i i 1 2 3 across space the host country will determine the time games are broadcast live in the united states lastly the third source of variation is the time games are broadcast live in each u s time zone as each match broadcast s scheduled time will differ across different time zones potentially the same game will overlap with the workday in a time zone within the united states and not in other time zones empirically i compare deviations in a worker s weekly work hours during the world cup from his usual work schedule with the deviations from the usual workweek of a demographically equivalent worker at other times importantly and as argued above games played in different countries are televised live at different local times and the times that these games are televised locally will determine whether the timing of the world cup overlaps with the worker s regular work schedule in each u

is soccer good for you the motivational impact of big sporting events on the unemployed we examine the effect of salient international soccer tournaments on the motivation of unemployed individuals to search for employment using the german socio economic panel 1984 2010 exploiting the random scheduling of survey interviews we find significant effects on motivational variables such as the intention to work or the reservation wage furthermore the sporting events increase perceived health as well as worries about the general economic situation

the week end effect in common stock returns the international evidence this paper examines the daily stock market returns for four foreign countries we find a so called week end effect in each country in addition the lowest mean returns for the japanese and australian stock markets occur on tuesday the remainder of the paper answers four questions are seasonal patterns in foreign stock markets independent of those previously reported in the u s do japan and australia exhibit a seasonal one day out of phase due to different time zones do settlement procedures across countries bias week end effects does the seasonal pattern in foreign exchange offset the week end effect in stocks for americans investing overseas some of the most anomalous empirical findings in finance are associated with the sample distributions of daily common stock returns cross 1 french 2 gibbons and hess 3 and keim and stambaugh 4 have documented that the average return on friday is abnormally high and the average return on monday is abnormally low to our knowledge this so called day of the week effect or week end effect has yet to be explained because this anomaly has been reported primarily for u s stock returns it is appropriate to investigate whether similar results occur for other countries positive findings would strongly support the proposition that the weekly seasonal effect is a general world wide phenomenon rather than the result of a special type of institutional arrangement in the u s to shed more light on this proposition our paper examines stock market returns in the u k japan canada and australia since we find a week end effect in each country we can examine a set of interesting questions for example are these seasonals independent of the previously reported seasonal in the u s due to different time zones do far eastern countries exhibit a seasonal one day out of phase do different settlement procedures across countries influence weekend effects does the seasonal in foreign exchange fluctuations see mcfarland pettit and sung 7 and levi 6 offset the week end effect in stock market returns for americans investing overseas

preference elicitation under oath eliciting sincere preferences for non market goods remain a challenge due to the discrepency between hypothetical and real behavior and false zeros the gap arises because people either overstate hypothetical values or understate real commitments or a combination of both herein we examine whether the traditional real world institution of the solemn oath can improve preference elicitation applying the social psychology theory on the oath as a truth telling commitment device we ask our bidders to swear on their honour to give honest answers prior to participating in an incentive compatible second price auction the oath is an ancillary mechanism to commit bidders to bid sincerely in a second price auction results from our induced valuation testbed treatments suggest that the oath only auctions outperform all our other auctions real and hypothetical in our homegrown valuation treatments eliciting preferences for dolphin protection the oath only design induced people to treat as binding both their experimental budget constraint i e lower values on the high end of the value distribution and participation constraint i e positive values in place of the zero bids used to opt out of auction based on companion treatments we show the oath works through an increase in the willingness to tell the truth due to a strengthening of the intrinsic motivation to do so

partial adjustment or stale prices implications from stock index and futures return autocorrelations we investigate the relation between returns on stock indices and their corresponding futures contracts to evaluate potential explanations for the pervasive yet anomalous evidence of positive short horizon portfolio autocorrelations using a simple theoretical framework we generate empirical implications for both microstructure and partial adjustment models the major findings are i return autocorrelations of indices are generally positive even though futures contracts have autocorrelations close to zero and ii these autocorrelation differences are maintained under conditions favorable for spot futures arbitrage and are most prevalent during low volume periods these results point toward microstructure based explanations and away from explanations based on behavioral models

is technical analysis in the foreign exchange market profitable a genetic programming approach using genetic programming techniques to find technical trading rules we find strong evidence of economically significant out of sample excess returns to those rules for each of six exchange rates over the period 1981 1995 further when the dollar deutsche mark rules are allowed to determine trades in the other markets there is significant improvement in performance in all cases except for the deutsche mark yen betas calculated for the returns according to various benchmark portfolios provide no evidence that the returns to these rules are compensation for bearing systematic risk bootstrapping results on the dollar deutsche mark indicate that the trading rules detect patterns in the data that are not captured by standard statistical models

linear and nonlinear dependence in turkish equity returns and its consequences for financial risk management abstract this paper investigates the dynamic behaviour of daily aggregate returns of one of europe s largest and fastest growing emerging equity markets the istanbul stock exchange ise it is found that ise returns exhibit significant linear and nonlinear dependence we investigate the nature and source of the nonlinear dependence and find that it is due primarily to linear dependence in the conditional variance of returns rather than nonlinear dependence in the conditional mean we analyse the implications of our findings for financial risk management we show that by exploiting the nonlinear dependence in ise returns the average capital required to cover against unexpected portfolio losses can be considerably reduced in contrast exploiting the linear dependence in ise returns has only a negligible impact on capital requirements

firm characteristics and analyst following abstract this paper examines the major determinants of the number of analysts following a firm a simple model of analyst following is proposed and several firm characteristics are suggested that are likely to influence the extent of a firm s analyst following by either affecting the aggregate demand for or supply of analyst services or both for the firm almost all of these characteristics are found to be strongly significant in affecting the extent of analyst following of firms and the empirical results generally accord well with economic intuition

first in first win evidence on schedule effects in round robin tournaments in mega events the order of actions in contests may have a significant effect on performance in this study we examine the role of the schedule in round robin tournaments with sequential games between three and four contestants our empirical analysis based on soccer fifa world cups and uefa european championships and on two olympic wrestling events reveals that there is a substantial advantage to the contestant who competes in the first and third matches our findings are in line with the hypothesis that winning probabilities in multi stage contests with sequential games are endogenously depending on the schedule of contests as predicted by game theoretical models we also discuss possible ways to reduce the effect of the schedule

losing sleep at the market comment in a recent provocative paper in this journal mark j kamstra et al 2000 test and reject the hypothesis that the mean weekend return following changes in daylight saving time equals the mean weekend return throughout the rest of the year the authors report that the average friday to monday return on daylight saving weekends is 200 500 percent larger than the average negative return for the other weekends of the year the nding appears to hold not only in the united states and canada where daylightsaving date patterns are similar but also in the united kingdom whose patterns ostensibly differ from those in north america the results also appear robust to alternative statistical methods based on time varying conditional heteroscedasticity and or bootstrapping this paper provides further robustness tests of the results reported by kamstra et al i show that the difference between mean weekend returns for daylight saving and non daylightsaving weekends is signi cant only for fall changes in daylight saving time and that the fall difference is driven by two outliers associated with international stock market crises two separate adjustments for the heteroscedasticity these outliers induce cause the signi cance of the fall difference to vanish the total sample spring plus fall difference remains marginally signi cant for some indexes after heteroscedasticity adjustments with classical xed level hypothesis tests however bayesian sample size adjustments produce posterior odds ratios that consistently favor the null hypothesis of no daylight saving anomaly over the alternative that the anomaly exists i also fail to reject the hypothesis that daylight saving and nondaylight saving weekend returns have equal distributions for these reasons i question the robustness of the ndings reported by kamstra et al 2000 section i presents more details of my tests and section ii summarizes my ndings and discusses their interpretation

sad or happy the effects of emotions on stated preferences for environmental goods a substantial literature in behavioural science and psychology shows that emotions affect human choices and values this paper investigates whether such emotional impacts are also present in stated choice experiments for environmental goods if this were so it would introduce an additional element of context dependence to the welfare measures derived from such methods and would be at odds with the rational choice model underlying welfare economics a laboratory experiment using three different emotion treatments was combined with a stated preference choice experiment concerned with changes in coastal water quality and fish populations in new zealand no statistically significant effects of changes in emotional state on estimated preference parameters willingness to pay or the randomness of choices were found the paper concludes by questioning why such a contrast exists with empirical findings in behavioural science

losing sleep at the market the daylight saving anomaly reply motivated by the recent flurry of activity in sleep research this paper explores the connection between sleep disruptions following spring and fall clock shifts associated with daylight savings time and equity returns it is shown that the weekend effect in the form of the lower than expected friday to monday returns is particularly pronounced for the two weekends involving daylight savings clock changes this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item