Kuntara Pukthuanthong

An international CAPM for partially integrated markets: Theory and empirical evidence

This article proposes a theoretical testable capital asset pricing model for partially segmented markets. We establish that if some investors do not hold all international assets because of direct and/or indirect barriers, the world market portfolio is not efficient and the traditional international CAPM must be augmented by a new factor reflecting the local risk undiversifiable internationally. We also introduce a suitable framework to test this model empirically. Using a sample of six emerging markets and three mature markets, we find that the degree of stock market integration varies through time and that most of the sample emerging markets have become more integrated in the recent years. The local risk premium for emerging markets represents the most important component of the total risk premium, but its relative importance has decreased recently. Differently, the total risk premium for developed countries is largely driven by global factors.

Is the Diversification Benefit of Frontier Markets Realizable by Mean-Variance Investors? The Evidence of Investable Funds

The authors investigate whether the diversification benefits of frontier markets are realizable. They focus on investable frontier exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and their corresponding indices. Their analysis ncludes directly measuring the economic benefits of frontier-market diversification, as well as considering frontier-market trading dynamics. Evidence indicates that frontier markets offer diversification benefits through risk-reducing potential. The authors find that frontier market volatility tends to be largely idiosyncratic, which supports the risk-reducing role of frontier markets. Their comparison of funds and indices indicates that, to the extent that frontier-market indices offer hypothetical benefits, traders can obtain these benefits by using investable funds.

Venture Capital in Europe: Closing the Gap to the U.S.

We review recent developments in the European venture capital (VC) markets. For decades, most of the Continent has lagged behind the U.S. in attracting and retaining young entrepreneurs. Despite several governmental attempts to provide tax incentives and an appropriate infrastructure that would allow young start-up firms to establish themselves, European private and public markets for high-risk companies are still weak. While we document that Europe’s VC markets have grown considerably over the past eight years, European VC funds underperform U.S. funds by a significant margin. We explore the reasons behind this underperformance and discuss possible remedies. Our study draws important lessons from the U.S. to show how important a flourishing venture capital market is to a country’s economic development and how Europe may close the existing gap between the old and the new world.

Legitimacy signals and family IPO performances

The objective of this research is to examine the relationship between signals including governance and management practices and the performance of family firms IPOs. Using IPO data of 129 family firms and 129 comparable non-family firms from the Taiwan Stock Exchange, our findings highlighted the role of non-family insiders, or non-family affiliated directors in the IPOs of family firms. Our comparison between family and non-family IPOs shows hiring prestigious underwriters significantly improves the performance of family firm IPOs. Finally, we found the industries of IPO firms moderate the relationship between corporate governance characteristics and IPO performances, as non-family firms in technology industries are perceived to be more legitimate than their family counterparts. This paper makes three contributions to existing research. Firstly, we contribute to the legitimacy theory by suggesting an interaction effect between internal (organizational) and external (environmental) factors. Secondly, our analysis highlighted the roles of affiliated directors and industry in the performances of public family firms. Thirdly, this study contributes to the family business research by underscoring the differences between family and non-family firms in the IPO context.

Random Walk Currency Futures Profits Revisited

Purpose - Recent research indicates that the random walk hypothesis (RWH) approximately describes the behavior of major dollar exchange rates during the post-1973 float. The present analysis seeks to examine the profitability of currency futures trading rules that assume that spot exchange rates can be adequately modeled as a driftless random walk. Design/methodology/approach - Two random walk currency futures trading rules are simulated over all available data from the period 1984-2003. In both cases, the investor buys currencies selling at a discount and sells those selling at a premium, as the RWH implies. The two rules differ only in the way they allocate the hypothetical investors resources among long and short foreign currency positions. Findings - Results show that an investor who used these trading strategies over the past decade would have enjoyed large cumulative gains, although periods of profit were interrupted by periods of substantial loss. Research limitations/implications - The findings encourage the hope that profitable random-walk-based strategies for currency futures trading can be devised. The simulation results have important implications for those willing to hedge, borrowers, and speculators. Originality/value - This paper provides evidence that purchasing futures contracts on currencies priced at a discount and selling futures contracts priced at a premium has generally been a profitable trading strategy during the last two decades of floating exchange rates.

A Protocol for Factor Identification

We propose a protocol for identifying genuine risk factors. The underlying premise is that a risk factor must be related to the covariance matrix of returns, must be priced in the cross-section of returns, and should yield a reward-to-risk ratio that is reasonable enough to be consistent with risk pricing. A market factor, a profitability factor, and traded versions of macroeconomic factors pass our protocol, but many characteristic-based factors do not. Several of the underlying characteristics, however, do command premiums in the cross-section.

Past Performance May Be an Illusion: Performance, Flows, and Fees in Mutual Funds

Mutual funds report performance in the form of a holding period return (HPR) over standardized horizons. Changes in HPRs are equally influenced by new and previously reported stale returns which enter and exit the horizon. Investors appear unable to differentiate between the joint determinants, reacting with equal strength to both signals. Stale performance chasing is amplified for funds which promote performance via advertising and is more pronounced during periods of uncertainty in financial markets. Fund managers exploit this behavior by preferentially timing fee increases to align with periods of heightened investor demand resulting from stale performance chasing.

Weak-Form Efficiency in Currency Markets

Many past studies have found that currencies trend, so technical trading rules produced statistically and economically significant profits. In other words, foreign exchange markets were weak-form inefficient. The study reported here reexamined this phenomenon with use of a new database of currency futures for 1975-2006 that includes old and newly liquid currencies. The findings from the recent data are contradictory. The profitability of trend following eroded for major currencies and their associated cross exchange rates around the mid-1990s. Newly liquid currencies after 2000 do trend, however, just as major currencies did in earlier years. The evidence is consistent with early weak-form inefficiency followed by vanishing trends as traders learn and adapt their strategies.

Do Hedge Funds Dynamically Manage Systematic Risk

Defining systematic risk management (SRM) skill as persistently low fund systematic risk, we find evidence of time varying allocation of hedge fund management effort across the business cycle. In weak market states, skilled managers focus on minimization of systematic risk via dynamic reallocations across asset classes at the cost of fund alpha and foregoing market timing opportunities. As markets strengthen, attention shifts to asset selection within consistent asset classes. The superior performance of low systematic risk funds previously documented arises due to the superior asset selection ability of managers in strong market states. Incremental allocations by investors arise due to this superior performance and not due to recognition of SRM skill.

On Valuing Human Capital And Relating it to Macro-Economic Conditions

Human capital is the largest component of aggregate wealth, but its relation to other macroeconomic variables is murky due to the lack of market prices. Valuing human capital using historical costs or expected income is characterized by substantial measurement error. We develop a human capital index using slave prices and relate its dynamics to that of other indicators including equities, GDP, real estate and interest rates. The human capital values are extrapolated from the 19th Century to the modern era. Their evolution has substantial implications for our understanding of the human capital dynamics, with applications to growth and portfolio allocation.