Skewness Of Stock Returns Research Articles

Stock Return Skewness and the Cross Section of Monetary Policy Announcement Premiums

Stock Return Skewness and the Cross Section of Monetary Policy Announcement Premiums

Can Real Options Explain the Skewness of Stock Returns?

We study a novel mechanism through which real options play a prominent role in inducing the skewness of stock returns. Building on the investment-based asset pricing framework, we show that firms’ real options to contract (expand) their businesses when productivity is low (high) can increase return skewness. Consequently, return skewness represents a U-shaped function of firm productivity. Furthermore, the real-options effect is stronger for more flexible firms, characterized by lower scale-adjustment frictions. Employing a large sample of U.S. firms during 1972–2018, we provide a battery of robust empirical evidence consistent with the model predictions. Our findings demonstrate that firm-level real flexibility can impact investors and managers’ decision making.

Can average skewness really predict financial returns? The euro area case

Jondeau et al. (2020) find evidence that average stock return skewness predicts stock market returns. Although this evidence is consistent with asset pricing theory, we are not able to replicate this result on a broad sample of stock returns taken from the well-developed euro area stock markets. Nor does accounting for potential slower information dissemination or using two alternative skewness estimators lead to finding predictability.

Litigating crashes? Insights from security class actions

AbstractInvestors tend to litigate large stock price declines, i.e., file ‘stock‐drop lawsuits’. However, it is less clear whether the ex‐ante threat of security class actions can deter stock price crashes in the first place. To answer this question, we exploit the 1999 ruling of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that discourages security class actions as a quasi‐exogenous shock, and find that reducing the threat of security class actions leads to a significant increase in stock price crash risk measured by negative skewness of stock returns. We reveal that the main effect is partially driven by a reduction in the timeliness of bad news disclosure and worsened earnings quality, which is consistent with the view that bad news hoarding serves as the key factor in the formation of a stock price crash. Our overall findings highlight the importance of security class actions in deterring the occurrence of firm‐level negative tail events on the financial market.

Does Innovation Explain the Skewness of Stock Returns?

This paper investigates the impact of firm-level innovation on the skewness of stock returns. Using data on a broad sample of equities from the major US stock exchanges, we find that innovative companies exhibit strong positive skewness. Our results are robust to both input and output measures of innovation as we find that increases in both firm-level research and development expenditure (R&D), as well as the number of patents, are positively associated with future stock return skewness. Our results hold using both systematic and idiosyncratic measures of skewness while controlling for various stock characteristics, time, and industry-fixed effects.

Firm uncertainty and corporate policies: The role of stock return skewness

We study the interaction between firm uncertainty and corporate policies, emphasizing the role of skewness in the distribution of performance shocks reflected in stock returns. Conditional on volatility and other characteristics, firms with more negatively skewed performance shocks adopt more conservative policies, including greater cash holdings, a lower likelihood of dividend payments and increases in payout levels, and less financial leverage. These relationships are significant and robust for asymmetry proxies constructed from stock return innovations, in contrast to results for measures based on accounting performance shocks. This disparity highlights the importance of asymmetries in long-run performance shocks for corporate policy choices.

The financial conglomerate discount: Insights from stock return skewness

Diversified banks (i.e. financial conglomerates) trade often at a discount compared to matched portfolios of specialized stand-alone banks. The existing research explains this evidence primarily with inefficiencies in the cash flow management of banks. This article analyzes the financial conglomerate discount by focusing on the role of expected returns approximated by measures of stock return skewness. Our empirical findings support the hypothesis that diversified banks have less skewed stock returns, i.e. they are more likely to perform badly than non-diversified banks. Due to the lower skewness exposure investors demand higher future returns, thereby lowering corporate value. Although the conglomerate puzzle is observed across industries, the previous literature examines banks separately, as the financial industry is hardly comparable to other sectors. We follow this field of research and show that huge banks quote at a discount as diversification into investment banking activities affects negatively the corporate performance.

Voluntary disclosure with evolving news

We study a dynamic voluntary disclosure setting where the manager’s information and the firm’s value evolve over time. The manager is not limited in her disclosure opportunities, but disclosure is costly. The results show that the manager discloses even if this leads to a price decrease in the current period. The manager absorbs this price drop in order to increase her option value of withholding disclosure in the future. That is, by disclosing today, the manager can improve her continuation value. The results provide a number of novel empirical predictions regarding asset prices and disclosure patterns over time. These include, among others, that disclosures are negatively correlated in time, and stock return skewness is negatively correlated with lagged returns for firms with low uncertainty over their future profitability, in more competitive industries, and in industries with less informative public news.

The Beta Anomaly in the REIT Market

This research examined whether the beta anomaly exists in the REIT market. By analysing a low-minus-high beta strategy and a betting-against-beta strategy in the REIT market, we find that high-beta REITs earn significantly lower risk-adjusted returns than low-beta REITs. This beta anomaly is only significant in the New REIT Era after 1993. The negative relationship between beta and REIT stock return does not disappear after taking into account some firm characteristics, suggesting that the beta anomaly in the REIT market is not driven by beta’s correlation with profitability, asset growth, lottery-like return or the skewness of stock returns. We find that institutional investors, whose portfolios increasingly contain a significant proportion of REITs, prefer the high-beta REITs. The exposure of institutional investors to high-beta REITs could explain the beta anomaly in the REIT market.

Voluntary Disclosure with Evolving News

We study a dynamic voluntary disclosure setting where the manager's information and the firm's value evolve over time. The manager is not limited in her disclosure opportunities but disclosure is costly. The results show that the manager discloses even if this leads to a price decrease in the current period. The manager absorbs this price drop in order to increase her option value of withholding disclosure in the future. That is, by disclosing today the manager can improve her continuation value. The results provide a number of novel empirical predictions regarding asset prices and disclosure patterns over time. These include, among others, that disclosures are negatively correlated in time, and stock return skewness is negatively correlated with lagged returns for firms with low uncertainty over their future profitability, in more competitive industries, and in industries with less informative public news.

Institutional investors and corporate social responsibility

Institutional investors appear to have selective preferences regarding corporate social responsibility. They appear indifferent to the presence of positive environmental (E) and social (S) indicators, but underweight stocks with negative ES indicators. This asymmetric pattern is particularly strong for longer-horizon institutions. Our empirical analyses indicate that this pattern is likely driven by economic incentives as the presence of negative ES indicators reflect downside risks: higher stock return skewness and probability of eventual bankruptcy and/or delisting. Positive ES indicators seem irrelevant in this context. Time-varying economic incentives also drive the dynamic pattern of institutional ownership of stocks with static negative indicators due to their controversial products (e.g., tobacco and firearms).

The Financial Conglomerate Discount: Insights from Stock Return Skewness

Empirical evidence shows that diversified banks (i.e. financial conglomerates) trade at a discount compared to a matched portfolio of specialized stand-alone banks. While one strand of research explains this puzzle primarily with inefficiencies in the cash flow management, we analyze whether this evidence is due to expected returns which compensate investors for skewness exposure. Our empirical findings support this hypothesis. We implement different (co-)skewness measures proposed by the previous literature. We illustrate that diversified banks have asset returns with lower skewness, and, as a consequence of lower upside potential, investors demand for these stocks a higher discount or, vice versa, higher expected returns. Different robustness checks corroborate our main result.

The effects of social responsibility on company value: a real options perspective of Taiwan companies

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a subject that has garnered considerable attention in recent years. This study conducts the empirical study by using a real options perspective to examine whether a company’s CSR commitment tends to increase its market value. According to Taiwan’s CommonWealth Magazine, this study distinguishes CSR and non-CSR companies. The paper estimates and compares the real options values of CSR and non-CSR companies and shows that high percentage of the company value is attributed to real options. This study finds that a company’s commitment to fulfilling its social responsibility increases its real options value and that the higher the number of CSR Awards won by a company, the higher its real options value. Compared with 10 years ago, investors now pay more attention to companies’ CSR performance. In addition, the higher a company’s size, systematic risk, fixed asset ratio, debt ratio, or skewness in stock returns, the higher a real options value is likely to be.

Superstar Firms and College Major Choice

We study the effect of superstar firms on an important human capital decision - college students' choice of major. Past salient, extreme events in an industry, as proxied by cross-sectional skewness in stock returns (or in favorable news coverage), are associated with a disproportionately larger number of college students choosing to major in related fields, even after controlling for the average industry return. This tendency to follow the superstars, however, results in a temporary over-supply of human capital. Specifically, we provide evidence that the additional labor supply due to salient, extreme events lowers the average wage earned by entry-level employees when students enter the job market. At the same time, employment size and employee turnover stay roughly constant in related industries, consistent with the view that labor demand is relatively inelastic in the short run. In the longer term, firms cope with the supply increase by gradually expanding the number of positions that require prior experience.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STOCK RETURN SKEWNESS AND BANK FEATURES

This paper studies to what extent bank-specific characteristics relate to stock return skewness. The main finding is that stock return skewness decreases significantly in bank size, measured in terms of total assets, i.e stocks of large banks are less skewed than those of small banks. This result holds for backward-looking skewness computed using the past stock returns, as well as for forward-looking skewness extracted from stock options. We interpret the empirical evidence by arguing that bank size increases the likelihood to have severe losses, to the point that investors expect to be compensated by receiving higher expected returns.

Distress Anomaly and Shareholder Risk: International Evidence

AbstractFinancially distressed stocks in the United States earn puzzlingly low returns giving rise to the distress risk anomaly. We provide evidence that the anomaly exists in developed countries, but not in emerging ones. Using cross‐country analyses, we explore several potential drivers of returns to distressed stocks. The distress anomaly is stronger in countries with stronger takeover legislation, lower barriers to arbitrage, and higher information transparency. In contrast, shareholder bargaining power and expected stock return skewness in a country do not affect the anomaly. These findings suggest that various aspects of shareholders’ risk play an important role in shaping distressed stocks returns.

Quantifying the cross-sectional relationship between online sentiment and the skewness of stock returns

The constantly increasing utilization of social media as the alternative information channel, e.g., Twitter, provides us a unique opportunity to investigate the dynamics of the financial market. In this paper, we employ the daily happiness sentiment extracted from Twitter as the proxy for the online sentiment dynamics and investigate its association with the skewness of stock returns of 26 international stock market index returns. The empirical results show that: (1) by dividing the daily happiness sentiment into quintiles from the least to the most happiness days, the skewness of the Most-happiness subgroup is significantly larger than that of the Least-happiness subgroup. Besides, there exist significant differences in any pair of subgroups; (2) in an event study methodology, we further show that the skewness around the highest happiness days is significantly larger than the skewness around the lowest happiness days.

The volatility of exchange rates and the non-normality of stock returns

In this study, we examine how exchange rate volatility in a particular country influences both the kurtosis and skewness of stock returns. In a variety of tests that hold constant the structure of the financial market, we show that exchange rate volatility is associated with greater kurtosis, and more negative skewness. We use the out-of-sample implementation of the Euro as an identification strategy in order to make stronger causal inferences. The implementation of the Euro created stability in exchange rates not only in the Euro Region but also in other parts of the world. We find some evidence that the adoption of the Euro decreased the level of kurtosis and increased the skewness of stock returns.

Real Options, Idiosyncratic Skewness, and Diversification

We show how firm-level real options lead to idiosyncratic skewness in stock returns. We then document empirically that growth option variables are positive and significant determinants of idiosyncratic skewness. The real option impact on skewness is more significant in firms with lottery-type features, small size, high volatility, distressed, low return on assets, and low book-to-market ratio. We also find that expectation on idiosyncratic skewness is associated with lower Sharpe ratios. This suggests investors are willing to sacrifice mean-variance portfolio efficiency for greater skewness deriving from real options. Furthermore, financial flexibility has a positive incremental effect, enhancing the beneficial role of asset flexibility on idiosyncratic skewness.

Forecasting Crashes: Correlated Fund Flows and Skewness in Stock Returns

This article uses the correlation of money flow among mutual funds to forecast the skewness of stock returns. We develop the Flow Driven Skewness measure and show that it is significantly related to future skewness of stock returns. Stocks with higher correlation between their mutual fund owners’ money flow are therefore more “crash prone.” The relation between Flow Driven Skewness and future firm-level skewness is especially important for the largest and the smallest firms in the sample, and remains true for all levels of skewness. The findings are robust to alternative drivers of skewness in stock returns, as well as the choice of calculation, empirical methodology, and sample period.