Heterogeneous Investors Research Articles

Examining the influence of institutional investors on the readability of environmental disclosure inCSRreports of Chinese listed firms

AbstractEnvironmental disclosure conveys non‐financial information primarily through narrative descriptions. The readability of such narratives affects the effectiveness of environmental communication and shapes information content. Prior research on the influence of institutional ownership on corporate disclosure strategy remains inconclusive due to the heterogeneity of institutional investors. In this study, we analyze a comprehensive sample of A‐share Chinese companies that issued corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to examine the impact of institutional investors on the overall readability of environmental disclosure. Our findings indicate that long‐term institutional investors have a positive influence on the readability of environmental disclosure, while short‐term institutional investors do not show significant correlation with readability. Furthermore, corporate governance acts as a mediating factor in the relationship between long‐term institutional investors and readability. We also find that long‐term institutional investors can enhance firm value by improving the readability of environmental disclosures.

Research on Algorithmic Trading and Its Role in Pricing Efficiency in Chinese Stock Market

This paper uses the A-share stock data in 2021 as a sample to study the impact of algo-rithmic trading activities on pricing efficiency through empirical analysis. Combining with the current market transaction structure and institutional characteristics in China, this study uses the proportion of small transaction volume STR as a proxy variable to measure the in-tensity of algorithmic trading activities in China. Empirical results show that algorithmic trading can effectively improve the pricing efficiency of Chinese stock market. In addition, an important way for algorithmic trading to improve pricing efficiency is to reduce stock market volatility and reduce investor heterogeneity. Through extended analysis, the find-ings demonstrate that algorithmic trading has a differential impact on the pricing efficien-cy of different stocks, with the highest degree of improvement in pricing efficiency for stocks with high market prices; at the same time, algorithmic trading can play a better role under the condition of sufficient market liquidity.

Flight to Lottery Ahead of FOMC Announcements: Institutional Investors or Retail Investors?

AbstractThis paper studies the pre‐Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcement drift at the stock level. We hypothesize that investors have a higher propensity to speculate before the monetary policy announcements by the FOMC, due to the resolution of uncertainty and associated reduction in investors' fear. Indeed, we find evidence that there exists a drift of lottery‐like stocks in the pre‐FOMC window, when investors' fear gauge is lower, together with higher demand for lottery‐like stocks and higher realized skewness. Moreover, we show that the demand for lottery‐like stocks ahead of FOMC announcements is more prominent among institutional investors than retail investors. Our findings also identify the key role of transient and quasi‐index institutional investors in our documented flight‐to‐lottery effect. Our findings advance the ongoing debates about the role of firms' investor heterogeneity in determining how monetary policy affects corporate managers' decisions. Our paper has important implications for central banks and managers by showing that investors' preference for lottery‐like stocks increases before FOMC announcements.

A continuous heterogeneous agent model for multi-asset pricing and portfolio construction under market matching friction

We propose a novel continuous Heterogeneous Agent Model (HAM) that applies to the general n>1 risky assets. In this model, every heterogeneous investor is identified with the continuous variables reflecting their personal characteristics. The heterogeneity of the market is captured by the distribution of these variables. By introducing market friction via a matching-based pricing mechanism, we derive a pricing equation from market clearing. The equation extends the classical CAPM and specifies how the bounded rationality and heterogeneity of investors can drive the actual price of risky assets away from their CAPM price. A system of ordinary (stochastic) differential equations are derived to govern the evolution of the total wealth and market value of risky assets held by the entire market (individual investors). From the equation system, a rolling-window-based maximum likelihood algorithm is developed to calibrate the model, which turn our HAM to a forecast tool for stock returns and an adaptive adjustment strategy for portfolio construction. This bridges the theoretical study on HAMs with the empirical studies of asset pricing and portfolio theory. We apply this tool to the Chinese A-share market and make a comparative analysis on its performance. The results demonstrate that compared to the classical forecast approaches in literature, our HAM has the advantage in identifying the tail risk in real market, which results in a more profitable portfolio in a variety of different investment horizons.

Social contagion and the survival of diverse investment styles

We examine the contagion of investment ideas in a multiperiod setting in which investors are more likely to transmit their ideas to other investors after experiencing higher payoffs in one of two investment styles with different return distributions. We show that heterogeneous investment styles are able to coexist in the long run, implying a greater diversity than predicted by traditional theory. We characterize the survival and popularity of styles in relation to the distribution of security returns. In addition, we demonstrate that psychological effects such as conformist preference can lead to oscillations and bubbles in the choice of style. These results remain robust under a wide class of replication rules and endogenous returns. They offer empirically testable predictions, and provide new insights into the persistence of the wide range of investment strategies used by individual investors, hedge funds, and other professional portfolio managers.

Evolutionary dynamics in financial markets with heterogeneities in investment strategies and reference points.

In nature and human societies, the effects of homogeneous and heterogeneous characteristics on the evolution of collective behaviors are quite different from each other. By incorporating pair pattern strategies and reference point strategies into an agent-based model, we have investigated the effects of homogeneous and heterogeneous investment strategies and reference points on price movement. In the market flooded with the investors with homogeneous investment strategies or homogeneous reference points, large price fluctuations occur. In the market flooded with the investors with heterogeneous investment strategies or heterogeneous reference points, moderate price fluctuations occur. The coexistence of different kinds of investment strategies can not only refrain from the occurrence of large price fluctuations but also the occurrence of no-trading states. The present model reveals that the coexistence of heterogeneous populations, whether they are the individuals with heterogeneous investment strategies or heterogeneous reference points of stock prices, is an important factor for the stability of the stock market.

Peers’ media coverage releases and investor heterogeneity

PurposeThis study aims to examine the behaviour of institutional and retail investors in response to news about industry leaders (peer firms) and to determine its impact on the stock prices of other firms (focal firms) within the same industry.Design/methodology/approachThe study investigates the impact of peer news on investor behaviour of Chinese A-shares listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2010 to 2019. The media coverage of industry leaders is sourced from prominent Chinese online financial outlets and the Chinese Financial Press. Support vector machine is applied to identify the positive, neutral and negative news within the articles. The study uses event study and logistic regression to examine the effects of peer news on focal firms’ investor behaviour.FindingsThe results show that both good and bad news about leaders cause peers’ stock prices to increase initially, but then reverse within one quarter. Further analysis reveals that when leaders’ shares receive positive news coverage, institutional investors tend to exert excessive abnormal buying pressure on peers’ shares, resulting in overreactions. Conversely, retail investors do not actively trade on peers on leaders’ news day due to limited attention. In addition, the study shows that short-selling constraint inhibits bad news from reflecting in the stock prices.Originality/valueThe study highlights differences in investor behaviour. The finding that institutional investors tend to overreact more to peer firms’ news when focal firms are smaller and have a lower frequency of information disclosure supports the salient theory. This is consistent with the previous framework that suggests overreaction is more pronounced when it is difficult to combine external sources of information to evaluate the focal firms. In contrast, retail investors do not engage in active trading on peers on leaders’ news day due to the limited attention theory.

Impacts of weather conditions on the US commodity markets systemic interdependence across multi-timescales

This study analyses the role of weather conditions in driving the interdependence of the US commodities system comprising energy, agricultural, and metal markets from January 2000 to October 2021. By measuring the commodity markets systemic interdependence through dynamic equicorrelation (DECO), total returns spillover (TRS), upside and downside tail risk spillover (UTRS/DTRS), we investigate the co-vary dynamics between weather conditions and interdependence of commodity system in time-frequency domains. We discover that low temperature level plays a significant role in leading the commodities DECO at 32–64 months time scale. It is shown that high temperature level, global horizontal irradiance, and wind speed acts as an important part in driving TRS at around 64-month time scale. We also find that high temperature level and global warming conditions have a negative leading influence on UTRS at 32–64 months time scale whilst cloud coverage, precipitation and runoff have a positive leading impact on the UTRS at the same time scale. Moreover, temperature is found to lead the change of DTRS at around 64-month time scale persistently throughout the sample period. Through incorporating heterogeneous investment horizons, our findings provide practical implications for commodity investors in adapting to climate change.

Dependence structure among rare earth and financial markets: A multiscale-vine copula approach

This paper examines the dynamic upper and lower tail dependence across rare earth metals, clean energy, gold, world equity, base metals, and crude oil markets at various time scales. Firstly, raw return series are decomposed into various time scales using the maximum overlapping discrete wavelet transform method, then the time-varying pairwise dependencies, accounting for the impact of the covariate (in our case, the rare earth stock index), are analysed using vine-copula. This so called multiscale-vine copula approach is applied to daily data from June 25, 2009 to October 7, 2022, covering the Covid-19 outbreak. The results show that, for raw returns, the rare earth market moderates the positive dependence between world equity and clean energy markets. At the short-term time scale, unlike other pairwise dependencies, rare earth eases the dependency between clean energies. During the Covid-19 pandemic period, the rare earth stock index significantly affects the correlation of the gold and oil markets and makes them more resilient to global health shocks. At the mid-term time scale, the impact of the rare earth index is more pronounced, for both the entire sample and during the Covid-19 outbreak, as the dynamic dependencies of most indices, such as clean energy-world equity, base metals-world equity, and crude oil-clean energy, significantly decline after accounting for the influence of rare earth metals. The main result at the long-term time scale is that the Covid-19 pandemic moderates the dependency of clean energy-gold even further when considering the impact of the rare earth stock index. In general, the rare earth stock index plays a significant role in easing the extent of dependency in the medium term during the entire sample and the pandemic. These findings provide some useful implications for heterogeneous investors and market participants operating at various time scales.

Responses of investors to earnings announcement: does the type of ownership holdings in banks matter?

PurposeThis study examines the influence of the ownership structure of banks on investors' behavior by dissecting the investors' response to news regarding performance indicators in private and government-owned banks.Design/methodology/approachThe event study methodology is used for the analysis. The data for 35 banks (out of 38), listed on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) for a duration of 230 months (January 2001 to February 2020) is collected. A set of cross-sectional regression analyses is done to identify variables influencing the returns under differential circumstances.FindingsPrivate banks seem to display a sharper response to negative changes in earnings, while government-owned banks show a more robust reaction to a positive change. The contrast is seen in the variables, having a bearing on the abnormal returns After controlling for a set of factors, the regression analysis shows the ownership structure may not matter on abnormal returns (on event day), the factors such as a change in quarterly earnings, firm-size and three-year average-sales growth influence the positive and negative changes in abnormal returns of government banks, and predictability for private banks is found to be poor regarding selected indicators.Originality/valueThe study evaluates the role of ownership structure on the heterogeneity in investors' responses to the financial performance of banks, thereby assisting in designing strategies to ensure the optimal outcome around the quarterly earnings announcements.

The Heterogeneity of Investors Based on Multi-fractal Features with Ultra-High Frequency Data

The Heterogeneity of Investors Based on Multi-fractal Features with Ultra-High Frequency Data

Foreign ownership, heterogeneous beliefs, and stock market volatility

This paper examines the effect of foreign ownership on stock market volatility, and further explore the mediating effect of heterogeneous beliefs on the above relationship. We use the data from China's stock markets in 2015 to 2021, present evidence that foreign ownership significantly reduces stock market volatility and heterogeneous investor beliefs are mediating variables for foreign ownership in influencing stock market volatility. To verify the robustness of the results, we conduct further tests by changing the measure of heterogeneous investor beliefs and adding control variables, and all findings are consistent.

Mechanisms Underlying Geopolitical Shocks and Stock Price Crash Risk: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT Geopolitical uncertainty imposes a significant impact on stock prices in the stock market. We construct dynamic estimations of geopolitical risk exposure of individual stocks listed in China and examine the relationship between individual geopolitical risk and future stock price crash risk. Our results show that geopolitical risk is a more prominent macro factor than economic policy uncertainty measure that affects stock price crash risk. Investigating the underlying mechanism, we find that firms with highly synchronized stock prices, low analyst coverage ratio, low institutional holdings, and large investor heterogeneity tend to be affected more by geopolitical shocks, leading to future stock price crashes. This study shows the importance of promoting efficient information transmission system and improving corporate governance.

The interaction of wholesale electricity market structures under futures with decarbonization policy goals: A complexity conundrum

Competitive wholesale electricity markets can help facilitate energy system decarbonization by incentivizing investments in clean energy technologies that meet evolving system needs. We explore market structure impacts on generator operations and deployment by risk-averse, heterogeneous investor firms using the Electricity Markets and Investment Suite – Agent-based Simulation (EMIS-AS) model. We apply clean energy targets of 45%–100% by 2035 considering energy, ancillary services, capacity, and clean energy credit products and pricing and eligibility rules. Results highlight a complexity conundrum, whereby finding the “right” market design to achieve decarbonization goals and avoid unintended consequences can be a highly-nuanced, non-incremental challenge. Carefully designed energy-only markets can achieve the same clean energy targets as capacity market structures but with different revenue and profitability outcomes. Operating reserve demand curve-based scarcity pricing can substitute capacity markets for similar deployment outcomes. Carbon pricing alone is most effective at achieving decarbonization levels at low clean energy targets, and clean energy credit markets and carbon pricing are substitutionary at high clean energy targets. Restricting technology participation in capacity and operating reserve markets can impact deployment and operations, even for nonrestricted technologies. Adding an inertia product with fast frequency response yields insufficient provision at high clean energy targets, but work is needed to understand frequency requirements and capabilities.

Where will corporate capital flow to? Revisiting the impact of China's pilot carbon emission trading system on investment

As a policy instrument to address climate change, the Carbon Emissions Trading System (ETS) will directly affect the location choice and development strategies of high-emitting firms' off-site investments, which is crucial to achieve optimal allocation of capital factors and coordinated development among regions. Using data of Chinese listed companies from 2007 to 2020, this study assesses for the first time the impact of Carbon Emissions Trading System on regulated firms' off-site investment strategies at the firm level using the Heterogeneity-Robust Difference-in-differences approach. The estimation results indicate that (1) the Carbon Emissions Trading System leads to about 20% reduction in off-site investment by regulated firms, which is mainly reflected in cross-city investment; (2) the heterogeneous investment effect is more obvious in private enterprise groups, but not in state-owned enterprise groups. Government intervention influenced the investment decisions of enterprise groups to make their development strategies more consistent with local economic growth objectives; (3) regulated enterprise groups significantly expanded their production layout locally and reduced off-site production investment; (4) the Carbon Emissions Trading System will promote long-term performance improvement of regulated firms. The above results are enlightening for the construction of Carbon Emissions Trading System in China and provide a new perspective for theoretically assessing the impact of Carbon Emissions Trading System on the competitiveness of enterprises.

Stochastic Interest Rates, Heterogeneous Valuations, and the Volatility-Volume Relation with Search Frictions

Abstract We propose a dynamic equilibrium model with stochastic interest rates in which agents hold heterogeneous valuations for the same asset and take on positions against each other. The model shows that interest rate uncertainty and investor heterogeneity are key determinants of price dispersion. Higher search intensity reduces price dispersion, while raising volume, leading to a negative volatility-volume relation. The sensitivity of volatility to volume is high when liquidity is low, interest rate variations are high and investors’ valuations are more heterogeneous. Evidence supports our model’s predictions and shows that search frictions play an important role in driving the volatility-volume relation. (JEL G12, G13) Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

When do they trade? Heterogeneous investors in China

This paper investigates whether different investor clienteles trade at different time of the day in the Chinese stock market. We document a unique overnight and intraday return pattern, which is that negative overnight returns are followed by positive daytime reversals. We find that compared to retail investors, institutions trade more actively around the market opening and closing. More importantly, the results show that stock prices move with institutions’, rather than retail investors’ trades across the day. This suggests that clientele trading time could be a potential explanation for the distinct return pattern observed in the Chinese stock market.

Effect of heterogeneous investment induced by payoff and emotion on cooperation in public goods games by considering memory decline effects.

Payoff, emotion, and historical memory directly determine investment decision-making for incomplete rational men in a public goods game (PGG). How these factors affect investment and cooperation behavior has not been investigated yet. Thus, we proposed a new investment model involving theses three factors to examine its coupling effect on cooperation in PGG. An emotional increment was employed to describe the emotional change in every round by supposing an investor' pleasure to a cooperator but regret to a defector. Furthermore, an emotional index was formed by accumulating these historical changes with a memory decline effect. Then an investment formula was proposed by considering this emotional index and a historical payoff. Moreover, the cooperation level affected by these factors was investigated. Results show a mutually reinforcing relationship between emotional and payoff investments. A poor memory capacity coefficient allows defectors to change their behaviors but produces some opportunists. A large memory length results in a high cooperator fraction but is not suggested to be too large.

Does foreign institutional ownership matter for stock price synchronicity? International evidence

We investigate the relation between foreign institutional ownership and stock price synchronicity, and whether this relation varies across country-level institutional and information infrastructures. Using a comprehensive dataset for firms across 40 countries over the period between 2000 and 2016, we document the following notable findings. First, foreign institutional ownership is negatively associated with stock price synchronicity. Second, we find that improved information transparency is a possible channel underlying the effect of foreign institutional ownership on stock price synchronicity. In addition, the synchronicity-reducing effect of foreign institutional ownership is more pronounced for firms in countries with weaker institutional infrastructures. Finally, our results reveal different impacts of foreign institutional ownership on stock price synchronicity across various types of foreign institutional ownership, highlighting the importance of foreign investor heterogeneity in improving firm information environment.

Sustainable energy transition and circular economy: The heterogeneity of potential investors in rural community renewable energy projects

AbstractCommunity renewable energy has been acknowledged as a necessary step in the transition toward a sustainable energy system. It can contribute to the achievement of energy autonomy by communities. In rural settings, it can be a driver of sustainable rural development. And it can be seen as a specific contribution to circular economy from the energy sector. The willingness to invest in community renewable energy has received some attention in previous research but needs further investigation at the local rural scale through quantitative approaches. Based on a survey in a small Galician village, this study contributes to the filling of this gap. The willingness to invest of its inhabitants is analyzed in relation to alternative financial, sociodemographic and sociopsychological features. Survey results show the heterogeneity of individual attitudes and concerns that condition the willingness to invest in rural community renewable energy and the different perceptions of risk and return related to these projects. Cluster analysis allows identifying four different investor profiles (skeptics, financial illiterate, enthusiasts, yield investors). These should be accounted for by project promoters and policymakers when designing incentives and strategies to foster community renewable energy in rural settings.