<p>In my dissertation, I study the link between economic growth and asset prices in stochastic endogenous growth models. In these settings, long-term growth prospects are endogenously determined by innovation and R\&D. In equilibrium, R\&D endogenously drives a small, persistent component in productivity which generates long-run uncertainty about economic growth. With recursive preferences, this growth propagation mechanism helps reconcile a broad spectrum of equity and bond market facts jointly with macroeconomic fluctuations.</p> / Dissertation

Prior research has established that stocks with high dispersion of earnings forecasts or short interest are associated with low subsequent returns. Assuming dispersion of forecasts is a proxy for divergence of opinions and short interest is a proxy for short selling constraints, these results have been traditionally attributed to correction for overpricing created by binding short selling constraints. This argument is provided by Miller (1977), and states that prices reflect an optimistic view when investors with pessimistic views can not trade due to short selling constraints, and that the more opinions diverge, the more stocks become overpriced. I test whether dispersion of forecasts exacerbates overpricing, but find evidence contrary to Miller’s theory. When dispersion of forecasts increases, prices decrease. I offer an explanation based on analysts’ reluctance to quickly revise their forecasts downward. I show that some analysts’ sluggish response to bad news results in dispersion of forecasts. The inertia in downward forecast revisions also leads to market underreaction to bad news. Therefore, the negative relationship between dispersion and subsequent returns may be attributable to analysts’ sluggish response to bad news. I also examine the return predictability of firms with high short interest and low institutional ownership. Short interest seems to predict not only future stock returns but also future earnings news, especially for firms with lower institutional ownership. Therefore, the return predictability of short interest seems to be associated with value relevant information short sellers seem to have gathered.

The efficiency of commodity futures markets is a widely debated topic in academia. The cotton futures market is no exception. The existence of trends in the futures market is characterized as a price bias, which is a testable trait. When analyzed, it allows a better understanding of market behavior and allows implementation of more effective income enhancing and/or risk reducing strategies. Three different approaches will be used to test the efficiency of the U.S. cotton futures market: pricing patterns, cointegration, and asset-pricing. In the first approach, pricing patterns, statistical methodology was applied to a dataset of daily futures prices. Returns did not show a consistent trend, supporting arguments of efficiency. Further research into seasonally-differentiated contracts has yielded strong evidence of declining prices. This result differs from previously published work in the most comprehensive study of futures prices, while updating and extending information on pricing patterns in the cotton futures market. Co-integration, the second approach, is a popular method for testing the efficiency of various commodity future and cash markets. Evidence indicates that the cotton futures and cash markets are co-integrated over the last ten years. Results lead to the conclusion that price is discovered in the cotton futures market, reinforcing the notion of an efficient cotton futures market that serves as an indicator for future cotton cash prices. The cotton futures market was also analyzed to explain price movements with an equilibrium asset-pricing framework, in the third approach. In particular, the cotton futures market was analyzed to determine if behavior displayed by the market could be explained by risks specific to the cotton futures contract. Cotton futures do not show significant risk premiums over other financial assets, again supporting the efficient market hypothesis. The three approaches implemented in this thesis are generally supportive of longrun efficiency in the U.S. cotton futures market. An updated analysis of the cotton futures market will allow market participants the most recent information on pricing patterns and the overall long-run behavior of the market. More effective trading and operating strategies can be implemented that will best meet needs of market participants.

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Prices in financial markets are primarily driven by the interaction of risk and time. The returns to financial assets over long time horizons are primarily driven by fundamental news regarding their promised cash flows. In contrast, short-run price variation is associated with a large degree of predictable, transient investor trading behavior unrelated to fundamental prospects. The quantity of long-run risk directly affects economic well-being, and its magnitude has varied significantly over the past century. The theoretical model presented here shows some success in quantifying the impact of news about future risks on asset prices. In particular, some investing strategies that appear to offer anomalously large returns are associated with high exposures to future long-run risks. The historical returns to these portfolios are partly a result of investors’ distaste for assets whose worth declines when uncertainty increases. The financial sector is tasked with pricing these risks in a way that properly allocates investment resources. Over the past thirty years, this sector has grown much more rapidly than the economy as a whole. As a result, asset prices appear to be more informative. However, the new information relates to short-term uncertainty, not long-run risk. This type of high-frequency information is unlikely to affect real investment in a way that would benefit broader economic growth.

This dissertation presents four essays. The first chapter builds a real-options, term structure model of the firm incorporating stochastic volatility and endogenous default to shed new light on the value premium, financial distress, momentum, and credit spread puzzles. The paper uses recently developed methodologies based on asymptotic expansions to solve the model. The second chapter, coauthored with Adam Guren, presents a model that shows how foreclosures can exacerbate a housing bust and delay the housing market's recovery. Quantitatively, the model successfully explains aggregate and retail price declines, the foreclosure share of volume, and the number of foreclosures both nationwide and across MSAs. The third and fourth chapters, coauthored with Stephen W. Salant and Jason Winfree, discuss the economics of untraceable experience goods in a variety of settings. The third chapter drops the "small country" assumption in the trade literature on collective reputation and shows how large exporters like China can address severe problems assuring the quality of its exports. The fourth chapter demonstrates how regulations in the formal sector of developing countries can lead to a quality gap between formal and informal sector goods. It moreover investigates how changes in regulation affect quality, price, aggregate production, and the number of firms in each sector. / Economics

This dissertation contains two essays that use empirical techniques to shed light on open questions in the asset pricing literature. In the first essay, I investigate whether foreign institutional investors affect stock liquidity in domestic equity markets. The evidence indicates that stocks with higher foreign institutional ownership subsequently experience higher liquidity. However, it is difficult to interpret the causal relation of this finding because institutional investors self-select into more liquid stocks. To solve this problem, I exploit a provision in the 2003 US dividend tax cut which extends tax-relief to dividends from US tax-treaty countries but not to dividends from non-treaty countries. This natural experiment suggests a causal link between foreign institutional investors and liquidity. Consistent with the predictions of theoretical models, I find that liquidity improves due to foreign institutional investors increasing information competition. In the second essay, I introduce a new measure of difference of opinion using mutual fund portfolio weights to test prominent competing theories of the effect of heterogeneous beliefs on asset prices. The over-valuation theory (Miller (1977)) proposes that in the presence of short-sale constraints stock prices reflects only the view of optimistic investors which implies lower subsequent returns. Alternatively, neo-classical asset pricing models (Williams (1977), Merton (1987)) suggest that differences of opinions indicate high levels of information uncertainty or risk which implies higher expected returns. My initial result finds no support for the over-valuation theory. Instead, the measure used in this study finds that high differences of opinion stocks weakly outperform low differences of opinion stocks by 2.42% annually which is more consistent with the information uncertainty explanation. / text

Sedan 2005 är det genom en förordning av Europeiska unionen bestämt att svenska börsnoterade företag ska nedskrivningstesta sin goodwill. Diskonteringsräntan som appliceras vid denna nedskrivningsprövning är av väsentlig betydelse. Vi replikerar delvis en studie av Carlin &amp; Finch (2009) som beräknade teoretiska diskonteringsräntor enligt Capital asset pricing model (CAPM) och jämförde med de diskonteringsräntor som börsnoterade företag i Australien använt i sin redovisning. Carlin &amp; Finch (2009) ansåg att avvikelserna däremellan kunde förklaras genom utövanden som är diskretionära och att opportunistiskt beteende förekommer när företag sätter sin diskonteringsränta. Vi använder ett underlag bestående av Sveriges största börsnoterade företag, de som är noterade på Large Cap- och Mid Cap-listan på Stockholmsbörsen, och studerar hur andelen som redovisat en enligt CAPM avvikande diskonteringsränta förändrats sedan de nya redovisningsreglerna trädde i kraft år 2005 till år 2009. Våra resultat visar att andelen företag som tillämpar en diskonteringsränta som enligt CAPM borde vara högre har stigit sedan 2005 vilket kan vara ett tecken på opportunistiskt agerande.

This work utilizes zero-beta CAPM to derive an alternative form dubbed the ZCAPM. The ZCAPM posits that asset prices are a function of market risk composed of two components: average market returns and cross-sectional market volatility. Market risk associated with average market returns in the CAPM market model is known as beta risk. We refer to market risk related to cross-sectional market volatility as zeta risk. Using U.S. stock returns from January 1965 to December 2010, out-of-sample cross-sectional asset pricing tests show that the ZCAPM better predicts stock returns than popular three- and four-factor models. These and other empirical tests lead us to conclude that the ZCAPM holds promise as a robust asset pricing model.

Asymmetric dependence (AD) is defined as dependence that differs across opposing regions of the joint return distribution. Recent evidence of AD between equity returns suggests that dependence can be decomposed into a linear component, captured by the correlation matrix, and a higher order component. When these higher order terms are characterised by increased correlation in bear or bull markets, the effectiveness of diversification strategies is reduced. To the extent that an investor is unable to completely diversify these higher order terms of dependence, it follows that they should be reflected in asset prices and managed explicitly during the portfolio construction process. The aim of this thesis is to determine the extent of AD amongst asset returns, to investigate whether AD is priced and to develop a means of managing AD in the portfolio. I justify the existence of AD and the separation of AD from linear dependence via the bivariate Edgeworth expansion, finding that the joint return distribution may be described by an infinite number of higher order co-moments. Correlation (and hence β) describes one dimension of an infinite number of higher dimensions describing dependence. To determine the importance of AD in finance, I first develop measures that can detect AD independent of the level of linear dependence and idiosyncratic risk. These measures are used to determine the extent of AD amongst US stock returns and the market, to obtain an understanding of how AD changes through time and to re-examine the evidence of AD between equity portfolios. By measuring AD separate from linear dependence, I demonstrate several findings. First, I find evidence of non-stationary AD that can exists irrespective of the magnitude of linear dependence, measured by β. This time-varying AD consists of both significant upper tail dependence (UTD) and significant lower tail dependence (LTD), although LTD is found to occur more frequently than UTD, especially for small stocks and stocks displaying high idiosyncratic risk. Significant time-varying AD is also detected between domestic equity indices and international equity markets, implying that if a portfolio is weighted towards certain industries or countries, portfolio construction methods may need to be adjusted in order too meet risk and return targets, particularly if future AD cannot be adequately forecasted. Next, I investigate whether AD is priced in US equities using the Fama and MacBeth (1973) regression methodology in conjunction with my β invariant AD metrics. I find that AD is as important as linear dependence in explaining the variation in returns. In particular, a positive relationship between LTD and return is found. I document an AD risk premium of 2.7% pa, compared to a β risk premium of 6.18% pa. The AD risk premium increases to 6.9% pa for stocks with significant LTD. This result holds after controlling for size, book-to-market ratio, downside β and coskewness. I also find past AD is a significant variable in predicting the future returns of small firms, whilst neither AD nor linear dependence predict the future returns of large firms. I subsequently demonstrate a means of incorporating AD structures during the portfolio construction process using copula functions. I then investigate how asymmetric return dependencies affect the efficient frontier and subsequent portfolio performance under a dynamic rebalancing framework. By considering the problem of tactically allocating a small set of domestic equity indices, I demonstrate several findings. First, I show that a Mean-Variance efficient frontier differs from the efficient frontier constructed under AD. Constructing paper portfolios based upon these differences, I find that real economic value lies in correctly accounting for AD structures. The primary source of this economic value stems from the ability to better protect portfolio value and reduce the size of any erosion in return relative to the normal portfolio. Finally, I document the benefits of actively managing AD during the portfolio construction process and determine a number of portfolio management principles required to successfully manage AD. I illustrate that managing asymmetry risk in a portfolio of international equity indices results in increased return, decreased risk and decreased transaction costs. I show that in order to yield these benefits, investors must actively and dynamically manage their portfolio. Furthermore, I illustrate that the ability to short-sell assets provides most of the benefits described.