No description available.

The increasing popularity of passive investment strategies causes the long-term feasibility of active investing to be questioned more often. Therefore, this research aimed to uncover whether active investors' influence on fund performance is positive and significant enough to offset the cost involved, thereby providing reasoning for active rather than passive investing. A comparative analysis of 211 actively managed funds and 191 market and industry-specific indices is performed. Security selection skills and market timing ability are captured through a model comprising of the Fama French three-factor and the Treynor and Mazuy market timing model. The sample is tested between 2005 and 2020, with 5-year sub-periods. Over the full period, active and passive returns are found to be nearly indistinguishable. However, active funds seem to excel during bearish periods, where passive funds excel in bullish periods. The standard deviation is higher overall for passive investing. This difference, however, disappears during bearish periods. The security selection skill is barely distinguishable from zero for either strategy. On the other hand, market timing ability is existent for active investors, indicating a positive effect in bearish markets and a negative effect in bullish markets. Additionally, for both investing strategies, more than 90% of the returns are explained by the movements of the general market. The most suitable investment strategy is truly determined by an investor's level of risk aversion. Nevertheless, this research found that, in general, the passive investing strategy is dominant under normal market conditions. Active investors can act on the macroeconomic developments that fuel crises. This advantage enables them to achieve returns superior to indices while preserving a lower standard deviation during bearish market conditions.

This study examines the relationship between the performances of US equity REITs and the market risk premium, SMB, HML, MOM as well as an industry index and a real estate index. The statistical significance of the abnormal returns and the beta coefficients of independent variables are examined. The REITs are categorized in seven groups according to their investment areas and the analysis results are compared. Daily return indexes of US equity REITs are collected for the period between 2005 and 2011. These data are then used to estimate the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) of Sharpe (1964) and Lintner (1965), the Fama and French&rsquo / s 3-Factor Model (1993) and Carhart&rsquo / s 4-Factor Model (1995). These models are re-estimated by adding an industry and a real estate index. The empirical results show that these added independent variables improve the available models. Additionally, no abnormal return is detected for REITs and their returns have a positive correlation with the SMB and HML factors and a negative correlation with the MOM factor. Therefore,, the REITs are relatively small and have high book-to-market ratios. The negative MOM coefficients indicate that the losers will win and the winners will lose.

We examine the effect of merger announcements on the stock performance of acquirers' industry rivals in the context of Chinese and US deals between 1994 and 2017. Our analysis reveals that investors of rivals are able to earn abnormal returns during days around merger announcement, meaning that markets are not fully efficient as implied by the Efficient market hypothesis. We conclude that in a reaction to the announcement, US rivals achieve generally negative abnormal returns with higher magnitude and volatility compared to Chinese rivals. Additionally, we observe that Chinese investors' perception of mergers turned out to be more conservative after the Global financial crisis. During days around the merger announcement, signs of rivals' abnormal returns also differ on whether the target is public or private in both countries. Rivals operating in industries that are substantially supported by Chinese government such as real estate, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals experience positive reaction on mergers of their competitors. Furthermore, we find that industries with increasing im- portance in Chinese developing economy such as banking, telecommunications, and cyclical consumer products show a positive reaction of rivals' returns on merger announcements while in the developed US economy, a negative...