Handbook of the Economics of Finance


Book Description

Arbitrage, State Prices and Portfolio Theory / Philip h. Dybvig and Stephen a. Ross / - Intertemporal Asset Pricing Theory / Darrell Duffle / - Tests of Multifactor Pricing Models, Volatility Bounds and Portfolio Performance / Wayne E. Ferson / - Consumption-Based Asset Pricing / John y Campbell / - The Equity Premium in Retrospect / Rainish Mehra and Edward c. Prescott / - Anomalies and Market Efficiency / William Schwert / - Are Financial Assets Priced Locally or Globally? / G. Andrew Karolyi and Rene M. Stuli / - Microstructure and Asset Pricing / David Easley and Maureen O'hara / - A Survey of Behavioral Finance / Nicholas Barberis and Richard Thaler / - Derivatives / Robert E. Whaley / - Fixed-Income Pricing / Qiang Dai and Kenneth J. Singleton.







Executive Compensation: Empirical Essays on the Antecedents and the Consequences, and the Role of Executive Personality


Book Description

Top managers have a significant impact on organizations because they are responsible for the formulation and implementation of corporate strategies, have the visibility and influence to shape the opinions of internal and external stakeholders, and coin the culture of their organizations, affecting employees at every level of the organization. Research has focused on the drivers and consequences of top managers' actions, with a particular focus on executive compensation, but important questions remain unanswered. This dissertation contributes to the literature on top executives by examining the antecedents of executive compensation, the influence of executive compensation on executive behavior, and the interplay of executive compensation and top executive personality. The first study introduces the role of compensation benchmarking for determining executive compensation to the management literature. It finds that benchmarking leads to compensation convergence. The second study examines the impact of executive compensation complexity on firm performance. The results show that compensation complexity is negatively related to accounting-based, market-based, and ESG-based metric of firm performance. The third study explores the implications of relative performance evaluation (RPE) on the imitation behavior of firms. It finds that the introduction of RPE is positively related to the imitation of the strategic actions of peer firms. The fourth study contributes to the growing literature on the impact of corporate social performance (CSP) goals in CEO contracts. Specifically, it examines how and when CSP incentives influence the CEO's attention to corporate social responsibility topics. The final essay examines the role of CEO personality; it finds that differences in CEO personality explain differences in the level of strategic conformity. Taken together, the essays in this dissertation make a significant contribution to the scholarly discourse on the influence of top managers on their companies. The empirical evidence presented expands the current understanding of how top executives affect strategic firm behaviors, and it provides insights for policymakers, managers, and investors.




Inefficient Markets


Book Description

The efficient markets hypothesis has been the central proposition in finance for nearly thirty years. It states that securities prices in financial markets must equal fundamental values, either because all investors are rational or because arbitrage eliminates pricing anomalies. This book describes an alternative approach to the study of financial markets: behavioral finance. This approach starts with an observation that the assumptions of investor rationality and perfect arbitrage are overwhelmingly contradicted by both psychological and institutional evidence. In actual financial markets, less than fully rational investors trade against arbitrageurs whose resources are limited by risk aversion, short horizons, and agency problems. The book presents and empirically evaluates models of such inefficient markets. Behavioral finance models both explain the available financial data better than does the efficient markets hypothesis and generate new empirical predictions. These models can account for such anomalies as the superior performance of value stocks, the closed end fund puzzle, the high returns on stocks included in market indices, the persistence of stock price bubbles, and even the collapse of several well-known hedge funds in 1998. By summarizing and expanding the research in behavioral finance, the book builds a new theoretical and empirical foundation for the economic analysis of real-world markets.







Behavioral Finance


Book Description

An in-depth look into the various aspects of behavioral finance Behavioral finance applies systematic analysis to ideas that have long floated around the world of trading and investing. Yet it is important to realize that we are still at a very early stage of research into this discipline and have much to learn. That is why Edwin Burton has written Behavioral Finance: Understanding the Social, Cognitive, and Economic Debates. Engaging and informative, this timely guide contains valuable insights into various issues surrounding behavioral finance. Topics addressed include noise trader theory and models, research into psychological behavior pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and serial correlation patterns in stock price data. Along the way, Burton shares his own views on behavioral finance in order to shed some much-needed light on the subject. Discusses the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and its history, and presents the background of the emergence of behavioral finance Examines Shleifer's model of noise trading and explores other literature on the topic of noise trading Covers issues associated with anomalies and details serial correlation from the perspective of experts such as DeBondt and Thaler A companion Website contains supplementary material that allows you to learn in a hands-on fashion long after closing the book In order to achieve better investment results, we must first overcome our behavioral finance biases. This book will put you in a better position to do so.




Complex Compensation: Empirical Essays on the Impact of Compensation Design on Firm Performance, Turnover, and Organizational Justice


Book Description

Compensation contracts have become ever more complex and individualized, particularly in the executive compensation domain, where increasingly diverse stakeholder demands and governance requirements have led to the inclusion of more and increasingly interrelated components into compensation contracts. Even the compensation of lower-level employees has become complex as firms individualize employee compensation and use many different rewards simultaneously. Research has examined elements of compensation in isolation but has attempted to avoid the complexities of compensation. This dissertation examines the consequences of compensation complexity and compensation design dispersion and contributes to a better understanding of compensation and its consequences for firms and employees. The first study examines how the complexity of executive compensation contracts affects firm performance. It finds that CEO compensation complexity negatively affects accounting, market, and ESG (i.e., environmental, social, and governance) metrics of firm performance and explores mechanisms that help explain the relationships. The second study examines the effect of compensation design dispersion within top management teams and its impact on executive turnover. The results show that compensation design dispersion affects executive turnover, both directly and in interaction with relative pay level. The third study addresses the role of compensation design dispersion in the development of procedural justice perceptions. Using two experiments, this study shows that compensation design dispersion causes lower procedural justice perceptions, which appears to be less problematic for participants with relatively easier to understand contracts. In summary, this dissertation provides a nuanced overview of complex compensation design and compensation design dispersion. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the effectiveness of compensation as an incentive and sorting tool for organizations, and of the implications of compensation design for the functioning of teams.




A Behavioral Approach to Asset Pricing


Book Description

Behavioral finance is the study of how psychology affects financial decision making and financial markets. It is increasingly becoming the common way of understanding investor behavior and stock market activity. Incorporating the latest research and theory, Shefrin offers both a strong theory and efficient empirical tools that address derivatives, fixed income securities, mean-variance efficient portfolios, and the market portfolio. The book provides a series of examples to illustrate the theory. The second edition continues the tradition of the first edition by being the one and only book to focus completely on how behavioral finance principles affect asset pricing, now with its theory deepened and enriched by a plethora of research since the first edition




Empirical Asset Pricing


Book Description

An introduction to the theory and methods of empirical asset pricing, integrating classical foundations with recent developments. This book offers a comprehensive advanced introduction to asset pricing, the study of models for the prices and returns of various securities. The focus is empirical, emphasizing how the models relate to the data. The book offers a uniquely integrated treatment, combining classical foundations with more recent developments in the literature and relating some of the material to applications in investment management. It covers the theory of empirical asset pricing, the main empirical methods, and a range of applied topics. The book introduces the theory of empirical asset pricing through three main paradigms: mean variance analysis, stochastic discount factors, and beta pricing models. It describes empirical methods, beginning with the generalized method of moments (GMM) and viewing other methods as special cases of GMM; offers a comprehensive review of fund performance evaluation; and presents selected applied topics, including a substantial chapter on predictability in asset markets that covers predicting the level of returns, volatility and higher moments, and predicting cross-sectional differences in returns. Other chapters cover production-based asset pricing, long-run risk models, the Campbell-Shiller approximation, the debate on covariance versus characteristics, and the relation of volatility to the cross-section of stock returns. An extensive reference section captures the current state of the field. The book is intended for use by graduate students in finance and economics; it can also serve as a reference for professionals.




Advances in Behavioral Finance


Book Description

Modern financial markets offer the real world's best approximation to the idealized price auction market envisioned in economic theory. Nevertheless, as the increasingly exquisite and detailed financial data demonstrate, financial markets often fail to behave as they should if trading were truly dominated by the fully rational investors that populate financial theories. These markets anomalies have spawned a new approach to finance, one which as editor Richard Thaler puts it, "entertains the possibility that some agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." Advances in Behavioral Finance collects together twenty-one recent articles that illustrate the power of this approach. These papers demonstrate how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena. To take several examples, Werner De Bondt and Thaler find an explanation for superior price performance of firms with poor recent earnings histories in the tendencies of investors to overreact to recent information. Richard Roll traces the negative effects of corporate takeovers on the stock prices of the acquiring firms to the overconfidence of managers, who fail to recognize the contributions of chance to their past successes. Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny show how the difficulty of establishing a reliable reputation for correctly assessing the value of long term capital projects can lead investment analysis, and hence corporate managers, to focus myopically on short term returns. As a testing ground for assessing the empirical accuracy of behavioral theories, the successful studies in this landmark collection reach beyond the world of finance to suggest, very powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioral approaches to other areas of economic life. Advances in Behavioral Finance is a solid beachhead for behavioral work in the financial arena and a clear promise of wider application for behavioral economics in the future.