Portfolio Allocation Decisions Research Articles

Retail investors and ESG news

An important debate exists around the extent to which retail investors make sustainable investments and, if they do, why. We contribute to this debate by investigating the aggregate trading patterns of retail investors around a comprehensive sample of key environmental, social, and governance (ESG) news events for U.S. firms. We show that ESG news events appear to be an important factor in retail investors’ portfolio allocation decisions. Yet, inconsistent with arguments about retail investors’ nonpecuniary preferences, our evidence shows that retail investors mainly trade on this information when they deem it financially material to a company’s stock performance. We also find their net trading demand predicts abnormal returns in the subsample of financially material events, consistent with retail traders benefiting from incorporating ESG-related information into their decision-making when it influences firm value. Overall we conclude that the average U.S. retail investor cares about firms’ ESG activities but primarily to the extent these activities matter for company financial performance.

Uncertainty and international fund flows: A cross-country analysis

This paper investigates the impacts of uncertainty on international portfolio allocation decisions and returns across 27 countries. Using panel structural vector autoregressive analysis, a positive link between both country-level and global uncertainty with equity fund flows is uncovered, highlighting the role of investor sentiment in capital allocation decisions. Findings also support the portfolio rebalancing theory, revealing the negative influence of past returns on fund flows. Results show that the VIX demonstrates a positive association with fund flows, particularly during periods of elevated global uncertainty. Moreover, this research analyzes differences between developed and emerging markets in their sensitivity to uncertainty shocks.

A Dynamic Analysis of the Impact of Household Portfolio Allocation Decisions on the Demand for Life Insurance

Prior research on the demand for life insurance in household portfolio holdings has not made a clear distinction between portfolio shifts resulting from active allocation decisions and those resulting from passive acceptance. Our study examines the relationship between household portfolio allocation decisions and the demand for life insurance in a dynamic setting, using panel data before and after the 2008 financial crisis. The study provides the first evidence that household decisions to invest in cash and cash equivalents, bonds, retirement assets, and pay off debts significantly affect life insurance ownership.

Do US Active Mutual Funds Make Good of Their ESG Promises? Evidence from Portfolio Holdings

We investigate the occurrence of greenwashing in the US mutual fund industry. Using panel regression methods, we test whether there exist differences in the portfolio investment behaviors of active equity funds that are self-declared to be driven by ESG motives when compared to all other funds. In particular, we focus on two aspects of funds’ portfolio allocation decisions, i.e., the actual implied average ESG ratings of the stocks a mutual fund invests in and the portfolio share invested in sin stocks. We do not find strong evidence that ESG and non-ESG funds make identical investment choices and hence reject the hypothesis of widespread greenwashing. ESG funds, on average, invest more in companies with higher ESG ratings and avoid sin stocks more than non-ESG funds. Nonetheless, we obtain evidence that some degree of greenwashing may still be occurring. However, over time, the differences between ESG and non-ESG funds in these behaviors seem have declined, suggesting a potential reduction in greenwashing practices.

Hedging, optimal capital structure and incentives for risk-shifting with preferences for liquidity

We develop a dynamic incomplete-markets model of entrepreneurial firms and demonstrate the implications of preferences for liquidity to entrepreneur's interdependent consumption, portfolio allocation, hedging and financing decisions. The numerical results provide several important implications. Preferences for liquidity reduce hedging demand using risky assets. Besides, the existence of preferences for liquidity decreases the implied equity value and encourages the entrepreneur to issue more debt. Especially, the preferences for liquidity can overturn the risk-shifting incentives of a risk-averse entrepreneur.

The influence of cultural norms on international equity allocation

We investigate the effect of cultural tightness-looseness on foreign bias in international equity allocation using data for 29 home investor countries and 37 destination countries for the period 2001–2018. We find that investors from a tight (loose) culture will exhibit less (more) portfolio diversification among foreign markets. Further, cultural tightness-looseness moderates the effect of Hofstede’s cultural values on foreign portfolio allocation decisions differently and depending on the cultural dimension analyzed. The consideration of cultural tightness-looseness in the models diminishes the contradictory and inconclusive results regarding the relationships between cultural values and foreign bias from previous studies. These results hold for various robustness checks.

Co-illiquidity management

We study the link between illiquidity and co-movement in illiquidity and the way asset managers trade off illiquidity and co-illiquidity in their portfolio allocation decision. By exploring two experiments – the 2005 SHO Regulation and 2016 Tick Size pilot program – we document the way fund managers manage co-illiquidity risk and the implication for the market degree of illiquidity and co-illiquidity.

TV media sentiment, mutual fund flows and portfolio choice: They do not put their money where their sentiment is

The central role of the media for people’s sentiment and for capital markets has been analysed by a broad range of literature, referenced from several strands of academic research. Applying a vector autoregression method to a unique set of TV news, consumer sentiment and excess flows of mutual funds, I have found evidence that daily TV news is reflected in consumer sentiment and that this reflection varies according to specific news topics. However, I have not found any evidence that this has an impact on viewers’ portfolio allocation decisions. Mutual fund investors neither seem to put their money where their newly gained insights from the TV news are, nor where their sentiment is. Anchoring also appears to play a role, at least for US investors. These findings are robust in relation to different measures of fund flows and as an alternative indicator for sentiment in the news media.

Swings in Crude Oil Valuations: Analyzing Their Bearing on China’s Stock Market Returns amid the COVID-19 Pandemic Upheaval

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has markedly affected energy valuations and financial markets. As such, this article aims to scrutinize the dynamic interplay between stock market returns and crude oil prices, with a particular focus on China, factoring in the second-moment effect of volatility spillover. Employing an EGARCH process to model the leverage impact on returns’ volatility, the analysis utilizes daily data spanning from January 30, 2020, to August 30, 2022, and incorporates causality-in-mean and variance assessments. Empirical findings indicate that the QDII-LOF benchmark, representing oil prices, exerts a substantial influence on stock market returns. Nevertheless, the complete sample reveals no discernible spillover effects attributable to oil price fluctuations. These insights imply that the Chinese government’s actions should carefully weigh the ramifications of spillovers. Concurrently, investors are advised to attentively monitor the crude oil market when making portfolio allocation decisions.

Drivers of Realized Volatility for Emerging Countries with a Focus on South Africa: Fundamentals versus Sentiment

We use a quantile machine learning (random forests) approach to analyse the predictive ability of newspapers-based macroeconomic attention indexes (MAIs) on eight major fundamentals of the United States on the realized volatility of a major commodity-exporting emerging stock market, namely South Africa. We compare the performance of the MAIs with the performance of a news sentiment index (NSI) of the US. We find that both fundamentals and sentiment improve predictive performance, but the relative impact of the former is stronger. We document how the impact of fundamentals and sentiment on predictive performance varies across the quantiles of the conditional distribution of realized volatility, and across different prediction horizons. Specifically, fundamentals matter more at the extreme quantiles at short horizons, and at the median in the long-run. In addition, we report several robustness checks (involving sample period and alternative definitions of realized volatility), and indicate that the obtained results for South Africa also tend to carry over to other emerging countries such as, Brazil, China, India, and Russia. Our results have important implications for investors with volatility being an input for portfolio allocation decisions. In addition, with stock market variability also capturing financial uncertainty, its accurate prediction based on US fundamentals and sentiment also has a role in policy design to prevent possible collapse.

Political uncertainty and cross-border equity portfolio allocation decisions: International evidence

Political risk models highlight that political uncertainty matters for corporate investment decisions. However, how political uncertainty matters for investment allocation decisions is relatively under-explored. In this study, we examine the impact of political uncertainty associated with national elections on foreign equity portfolio in 48 countries. Our results indicate that political uncertainty reduces international equity allocations to the host country and such reduction appears more pronounced in the election year. Further analysis shows that the interaction between political uncertainty and institutional quality has a positive and significant effect on international equity portfolio flow, suggesting that the value of institutional quality outweighs the negative effects of political uncertainty. Lastly, we find equity home bias to be negative and significant; however, the interaction between political uncertainty and equity home bias appears insignificant.

Macroeconomic fundamentals and cryptocurrency prices: A common trend approach

AbstractBased on asset pricing theory, we posit and find that equity markets and cryptocurrency markets share a common fundamental. Our cointegration tests show that the most important asset pricing primitive, consumption, can serve as the common fundamental. We further show that additional macroeconomic factors, as well as uncertainty and sentiment, all play a role in explaining the deviation from fundamentals. To understand the linkage between equity markets, cryptocurrency markets, and the macroeconomy, we suggest the following three channels: (i) portfolio allocation decisions, (ii) intermarket order flows, and (iii) technological adaption expectations.

Accounting for Spatial Autocorrelation in Algorithm-Driven Hedonic Models: A Spatial Cross-Validation Approach

AbstractData-driven machine learning algorithms have initiated a paradigm shift in hedonic house price and rent modeling through their ability to capture highly complex and non-monotonic relationships. Their superior accuracy compared to parametric model alternatives has been demonstrated repeatedly in the literature. However, the statistical independence of the data implicitly assumed by resampling-based error estimates is unlikely to hold in a real estate context as price-formation processes in property markets are inherently spatial, which leads to spatial dependence structures in the data. When performing conventional cross-validation techniques for model selection and model assessment, spatial dependence between training and test data may lead to undetected overfitting and overoptimistic perception of predictive power. This study sheds light on the bias in cross-validation errors of tree-based algorithms induced by spatial autocorrelation and proposes a bias-reduced spatial cross-validation strategy. The findings confirm that error estimates from non-spatial resampling methods are overly optimistic, whereas spatially conscious techniques are more dependable and can increase generalizability. As accurate and unbiased error estimates are crucial to automated valuation methods, our results prove helpful for applications including, but not limited to, mass appraisal, credit risk management, portfolio allocation and investment decision making.

Linkages between DeFi assets and conventional currencies: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper examines the static and dynamic returns connectedness between four renowned DeFi assets, namely, Chainlink, Maker, Basic Attention Token, and Synthetix, and four internationally important conventional currencies, being they Chinese Yuan, Japanese Yen, Euro, and Pound Sterling. We use the time-varying parameter vector autoregressions framework combined with the connectedness approach based on the generalized forecast error variance decomposition. Our static connectedness analysis evidences a low connection of the DeFi markets with the conventional currency markets. The results of our dynamic analysis reveal that the return spillovers are time-varying, with an abrupt increase in connectedness between the DeFi and currency markets in early 2020, during the initial escalation of the pandemic. However, the spillover from the Chinese Yuan to the system does not exhibit any hike due to the COVID-19-triggered meltdown, highlighting a pandemic-caused decoupling of the Chinese financial system from the other centralized and decentralized markets. We observe unprecedentedly high spillovers from the system to the DeFi markets at the beginning of the pandemic. However, we still find that the DeFi markets act predominantly as net innovation transmitters during the first COVID-19 year. Moreover, we detect the existence of a pairwise-like relationship between the net return spillover profiles and report on inversely symmetric profiles for the Maker - Euro, Basic Attention Token - Japanese Yen, and the Chainlink - Pound Sterling pairs. Given the time-varying transmission-reception patterns for all markets, investors and policymakers can make use of our spillover analysis to improve portfolio allocation and regulatory decisions.

Volatility spillovers among G7, E7 stock markets and cryptocurrencies

PurposeThe existence of long memory and persistent volatility characteristics of cryptocurrencies justifies the investigation of return and volatility/shock spillovers between traditional financial market asset classes and cryptocurrencies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the dynamic relationship between the cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum, and stock market indices of G7 and E7 countries to analyze the return and volatility spillover patterns among these markets by means of multivariate (MGARCH) approach.Design/methodology/approachApplying the newly developed VAR-GARCH-in mean framework with the BEKK representation, the empirical results reveal that there exists an evidence of mean and volatility spillover effects among Bitcoin and Ethereum as the proxies for the cryptocurrencies, and stock markets reviewed.FindingsInterestingly, the direction of the return and volatility spillover effects is unidirectional in most E7 countries, but bidirectional relationship was found in most G7 countries. This can be explained as the presence of a strong return and volatility interaction among G7 stock markets and crypto market.Originality/valueOverall, the results of this study are of particular interest for portfolio management since it provides insights for financial market participants to make better portfolio allocation decisions. It is also increasingly important to understand the volatility transmission mechanism across these markets to provide policymakers and regulatory bodies with guidance to eliminate the negative impact of cryptocurrency's volatility on the stability of financial markets.

Effects of idiosyncratic jumps and co-jumps on oil, gold, and copper markets

Using one-minute oil, gold and copper futures price from September 27, 2009, to July 1, 2020, this paper examines the effects of systematic and idiosyncratic (market-specific risk) jumps on intraday correlations, portfolio allocation decisions, and diversification benefits. We identify that these commodities contain high proportions of market-specific price discontinuities, which do not translate into systematic jumps. Co-jumps in the same direction lead to higher correlations and imply reduction in diversification benefits, while co-jumps in the opposite direction reduce correlations and positively affect diversification, similar to the idiosyncratic jumps. The results also demonstrate that the risk-averse investor’s gold portfolio allocations are not affected by co-jumps and are free from the non-diversifiable risks in oil and copper markets. However, idiosyncratic jumps in oil and copper markets increase allocations to gold. In contrast, allocations to copper and oil are significantly affected by the systematic risks outlined in copper–gold and oil–gold pairs, pushing risk-averse investors to oil from copper–gold and copper from oil–gold systematic risks. Finally, diversification benefits from price discontinuities are overall positive and driven by the idiosyncratic jumps in oil and copper markets when the minimum variance portfolio allocations are used.

Analyst Dividend Forecasts and Their Usefulness to Investors

ABSTRACTIn contrast to the disappearing dividends view prevalent in the literature, we document extensive dividend payments by firms and significant variability within firms and across 16 countries during 2000–2013. We predict that within-firm variability in dividends increases investor demand for forward-looking dividend information, and analysts respond by producing informative dividend forecasts. We find that analyst dividend forecasts are available for most dividend-paying firms and are more prevalent for firms with higher variability of dividends. Analyst dividend forecasts are more accurate than alternative proxies based on extrapolations of past dividends. Finally, dividend forecasts (1) are incrementally useful to investors beyond information in other fundamentals, such as earnings and cash flow forecasts, (2) help investors interpret earnings quality, and (3) are associated with investors' portfolio allocation decisions.Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Culture and mutual funds’ performance

This paper investigates how culture affects US global mutual funds’ financial performance. I show that cultural dimensions are crucial not only for portfolio allocation choices but also for assessing the performance of institutional investors. Choosing securities from familiar cultural proximate markets significantly enhances the performance of mutual funds. The results suggest that fund managers can create positive performance for their clients if their portfolio allocation decisions are titled towards choosing cultural proximate markets that exhibit lower levels of information asymmetry.

Dependence and Risk Spillover among Hedging Assets: Evidence from Bitcoin, Gold, and USD

Understanding the dependence and risk spillover among hedging assets is crucial for portfolio allocation and regulatory decision making. Using various copula and conditional Value-at-Risk (CoVaR) measures, this paper quantifies the dependence and risk spillover effects between three traditional and emerging hedging assets: Bitcoin, gold, and USD. Furthermore, we investigate these effects at various short- and long-term horizons using a variational model decomposition (VMD) method. The empirical results show that there is strong negative dependence between gold and USD, but Bitcoin and gold are weakly and positively connected. Secondly, risk spillovers exist only between Bitcoin and gold and between gold and USD. The risk spillover effect between Bitcoin and gold are not stable, that is, if Bitcoin or gold faces the downward or upward risk, both the downward and upward risk of another asset have the chance to increase. The negative risk spillover between gold and USD is stable, especially in long-term horizons. Finally, the risk spillover between Bitcoin and gold as well as between gold and USD are asymmetric at downward and upward market environment.

Dynamic spillover effect and hedging between the gold price and key financial assets. New evidence from Vietnam

ABSTRACT This study investigates the interlinkage of gold markets and Vietnamese asset classes at multiple investment horizons using a hybrid wavelet-based VAR-GARCH-BEKK approach. The findings show that the spillover effects between time series are time-varying across various wavelet scales in terms of direction and strength. The connectedness for various market pairs is weak in the short run but eventually strengthened towards the long run. We also analyse the multiscale behaviour of hedge ratio for optimal portfolio allocation decisions, which decompose volatility spillovers, allowing investors to adapt their hedging strategies.