Lilian K. Ng

A causality-in-variance test and its application to financial market prices

Abstract This paper develops a test for causality in variance. The test is based on the residual cross-correlation function (CCF) and is robust to distributional assumptions. Asymptotic normal and asymptotic χ 2 statistics are derived under the null hypothesis of no causality in variance. Monte Carlo results indicate that the proposed CCF test has good empirical size and power properties. Two empirical examples illustrate that the causality test yields useful information on the temporal dynamics and the interaction between two time series.

International evidence on the stock market and aggregate economic activity

Abstract Using the Johansen cointegration technique, we find empirical evidence of long run comovements between five national stock market indexes and measures of aggregate real activity including the real oil price, real consumption, real money, and real output. Real returns on these indexes are typically related to transitory deviations from the long run relationship and to changes in the macroeconomic variables. Further, the constraints implied by the cointegration results yield some incremental information on stock return variation that is not already contained in dividend yields, interest rate spreads, and future GNP growth rates.

The trading behavior of institutions and individuals in Chinese equity markets.

This paper employs a unique data set to analyze the trading behavior of 4.74 million individual and institutional investors across Mainland China. Results show that groups of individual investors with varying trade values (as proxies for wealth levels) engage in different trading strategies. Chinese institutions are momentum investors, while less wealthy Chinese individual investors at large are contrarian investors. The results also indicate that a small group of wealthiest Chinese individuals tend to behave like institutions when they buy stocks, and behave like less wealthy individuals when they sell. Furthermore, only the trading activities of institutions and of wealthiest individuals can affect future stock volatility, but those of Chinese individual investors at large have no predictive power for future stock returns.

Does Corporate Headquarters Location Matter for Firm Capital Structure

This paper studies the impact of corporate headquarters location on capital structure policies. We show that firms exhibit conformity in their financing policies to those of geographically proximate firms, and that the location of corporate headquarters helps explain the cross-sectional variation of capital structure in the United States. The location effect is robust to local credit market conditions and to state laws on corporate takeover and payout restrictions. The results suggest that non-economic factors, such as local culture and social interactions among corporate executives, play a significant role in influencing corporate financial policies of firms headquartered in the same metropolitan area.

Common Predictable Components in Regional Stock Markets

This paper employs recently developed multivariate methods to study the predictability of international stock market returns. The authors find evidence of significant common predictable components within the Pacific, the European, and the North American stock markets using region-specific instrumental variables. The degree of predictability of these common movements, however, varies across regional markets and across subperiods. Results indicate that only North American instrumental variables have the ability to predict excess returns on the stock markets in the other two regions but not vice versa.

Does Geographic Dispersion Affect Firm Valuation

We find that the geographic dispersion of a corporation affects its firm valuation. Firms with subsidiaries located in different regions of the United States experience a valuation discount of 6.2% after controlling for the impact of both global and industrial diversifications. The valuation discount increases as firms expand their operations to different regions nationwide. Results show that firms with more anti-takeover provisions are more likely to be geographically diverse, and that these firms experience greater value discounts compared with their counterparts with fewer such provisions. Our overall evidence suggests that the geographic location of corporate activities is an essential component of corporate policies and has important market valuation implications.

What are the global sources of rational variation in international equity returns

This paper uses multivariate statistical approaches to investigate the global sources of international real return variation. These approaches allow us to take into account the widely-documented evidence that stock market returns from different countries move in tandem with each other. In the spirit of Fama (1990), we examine two potential sources of international real return variation: changes in expected future cash flows and changes in discount rates. In this study, common global economic variables that relate to changes in the global economy or to international business conditions serve as proxies for the two sources of variation. Our results show that these two sources of variation capture a statistically significant fraction of stock price variability; their explanatory power, however, differs across holding period horizons. While proxies for changes in discount rates have an incremental impact on both monthly and quarterly real returns, proxies for changes in expected future cash flows have only an incremental impact on quarterly real returns. Our results are also generally robust to the different methodologies employed.

Pacific-Basin stock markets and real activity

Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between the Pacific-Basin country stock returns and real economic activity. It also examines the importance of the Japanese and U.S. economies to the Pacific-Basin financial markets by investigating the effects of the formers industrial production growth rates on the latters stock market movements. We find that the representative global instrumental variables can explain up to 18% of the monthly portfolio real return variability in the Pacific-Basin stock markets and 46% of the quarterly variability. Our evidence shows that U.S. industrial production growth rates tend to exhibit a stronger and more stable relationship with the Pacific-Basin real stock returns.

Does Shareholder Approval Requirement of Equity Compensation Plans Matter

This paper studies the impact of the 2003 SEC Regulation requiring shareholder approval of all equity-based executive compensation plans on executive compensation policies and practices at S&P 500 firms. Following the 2003 Regulation, firms with shareholder approved equity plans in place or those with strong performance, while not those with non-approved plans or weak performance, increase their equity compensation proposal submission activity. The quality of equity compensation proposals improves in the after-regulation period, and shareholders exhibit greater scrutiny and monitoring of executive compensation through increased voting rights. We find a decline in the equity pay component while an increase in the cash component of total executive compensation after the 2003 Regulation and also provide evidence that the 2003 Regulation contributes to this change in compensation structure.

Asset Pricing Specification Errors and Performance Evaluation

Many evaluation techniques typically measure performance as deviations of average returns on actively managed funds from those predicted by some asset pricing model. Empirical evidence, however, has so far suggested that all asset pricing models lack empirical support, implying that the models contain mis-specification errors to various degrees. Evaluating mutual fund performance relative to any of these models thus becomes problematic. In this paper, we propose an approach to performance measurement that emphasizes minimizing explicitly the pricing error associated with an asset pricing function which is employed to compute performance measures. This approach is henceforth called the minimum specification-error (MSE) method. We also discuss the statistical properties for implementing MSE performance measure. To demonstrate the significance of the pricing error confounded in evaluation measurement, we contrast our methodology with the Grinblatt and Titman (1989) period weighting approach and with the empirical implementation of Chen and Knez (1996). We find that the greater the pricing error of passive assets, the larger the performance measures. Given the average pricing error generated from a collection of 163 diverse passive portfolios used in this analysis the performance values assigned to a large number of the funds become statistically and economically insignificant.