China will soon become the largest economy in the world, but many Westerners (myself included) know very little about it. I’ve thus tried to educate myself about the Chinese economy, and earlier posted a summary of an excellent article on corporate governance in China by Professors Fuxiu Jiang and Kenneth Kim. This has turned out to be one of …
John Cochrane of Stanford has written an excellent review of recent advances and future research directions in macro-finance. Macro finance studies the relationships between asset prices (e.g. the level of the stock market) and economic conditions (e.g. whether we’re in a recession or a boom). These relationships are important. For example, if investors are more …
How Macroeconomic Conditions Affect Stock Prices Read More »
Andy Haldane, the Chief Economist of the Bank of England, said that pensions are so complex that even someone “moderately financially literate” like he can’t understand them. This complexity certainly applies to pension tax rules when combined with changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (for employees of UK universities): despite being a finance professor, it’s taken …
Translating the New USS Pension Rules Into Plain English Read More »
The first stock market trading strategy ever discovered was the size anomaly. Banz (1981) found that small stocks outperform large stocks, even after taking into account their higher risk. This finding has had profound implications, such as the creation of small stock indices (since the returns of small stocks shouldn’t be compared to large stocks) and the …
Executive compensation is a controversial topic. US CEOs earn 373 times the average worker, and so it takes them less than a day to earn the same as an average worker does in a whole year. But, despite attracting most attention and ire, the level of pay is actually not so important for firm value. Average …
How does an investor choose which mutual fund to invest in? She’ll want a measure of the fund manager’s skill, and the most natural measure is his past performance. But, a ton of research has systematically found that past performance doesn’t predict future performance – it’s irrelevant in choosing a mutual fund. How can this …
Predicting Mutual Fund Performance Using (Legal) Inside Information Read More »
(Update 15 July) The 2014 World Cup is now over. After Argentina’s loss in the final, its market was up 0.2%, underperforming the world index which rose by 0.6%. Germany’s index rose 1.2% – the biggest gainer among the major European indices. Excluding the anomalous Brazil defeat (which is explained below), out of the 39 …
The Effect of the 2014 World Cup on Stock Markets Read More »
If a company has bad news that it wishes to hide, where will it hold its shareholder meeting? As far away as possible! That’s the hypothesis of an ingenious paper entitled “Evasive Shareholder Meetings”, by Yuanzhi Li (Temple) and David Yermack (NYU Stern) that I saw at the Rotterdam Workshop on Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance yesterday. …
Underperformance of Companies Holding Meetings in Remote Locations Read More »
The previous post concerned momentum – a strategy of buying past winners and selling past losers. It discussed how this strategy does well on average, but on rare occasions (recent market downturns and high market volatility) does very poorly. Another reason why momentum may perform poorly is because other investors are chasing the same strategy. One of …