Essays in empirical finance

This thesis has three chapters in which I study transaction costs, anomalies and shadow banking activities.   In the first chapter (co-authored with René Garcia) a novel way of estimating transaction costs is proposed. Transaction costs have declined over time but they can increase considerably when funding liquidity becomes scarce, investors' fears spike or other frictions limit arbitrage. We estimate bid-ask spreads of thousands of firms at a daily frequency and put forward these large movements for several of these episodes in the last 30 years. The transaction cost of three-quarters of the firms is significantly impacted by funding liquidity and increases on average by 24%. While small firms and high volatility firms have larger transaction costs, the relative increase in transaction costs in crisis times is more pronounced in large firms and low-volatility firms. The gap between the respective transaction costs of these high- and low-quality groups also increases when financial conditions deteriorate, which provides evidence of flight to quality. We build anomaly-based long-short portfolios and estimate their alphas adjusted for rebalancing costs based on our security-level transaction cost estimates to show that all strategies are either unprofitable or lose money, except for price per share and industry momentum.  In the second chapter I study how the popularity of anomalies in peer-reviewed finance journals can influence the returns on these anomalies. I use the tone of the abstract of the publication in which an anomaly is discussed and the impact factor of the journal in which this publication appears to forecast the post-publication return of strategies based on the anomaly. The main finding is the following: when an anomaly is discussed in a positive tone publication that appears in a journal with an impact factor higher than 3 (Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies), this anomaly is more likely to attract investors that are going to arbitrage away the mispricing.  The third chapter (co-authored with Vasia Panousi) proposes a measure of the shadow banking activity of firms operating in the financial industry in the United States. For this purpose we use textual data analysis by extracting information from annual and quarterly reports of firms. We find that the shadow banking activity was higher for the “Depository Institutions", “Non depository Institutions" and the “Real estate" before 2008. But after 2008, the shadow banking activity dropped considerably for all the financial companies except for the “Non depository Institutions". Our shadow banking index satisfies some economic facts about the shadow banking, especially the fact that contractionary monetary policies contribute to expand shadow banking. We also show with our index that, when the shadow banking activity of the 100 biggest banks increases, the delinquency rates on the loans that these banks give also increases. The opposite is observed with the traditional banking index: an increase of the traditional banking activity of the 100 biggest banks decreases the delinquency rate.

Keyphrases: Transaction cost, Anomaly, Funding liquidity, Gibbs sampling, Bayes factor, Textual analysis, Journal impact factor, Shadow banking, Anomalie