Narrow Results

This study offers further evidence of the holiday effect on excess stock returns and volatility, and additional insights into its impact on the amusement park and attractions industry in the United States. The generalized auto-regressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model and dummy variables are adopted to investigate pre- and post-holiday excess returns and volatility. Empirical results suggest the following: (1) both excess returns and excess volatility happen more frequently in pre-holidays than post-holidays; (2) the frequency of excess volatility is higher than excess returns for the holiday effect; and (3) nearly all significant excess volatilities are negative. We, therefore, conclude that the holiday effect exists in publicly traded amusement and theme parks.

This paper reviews the extant studies on the equity premium. While paper attempts to make the review comprehensive, describing all of the work in this area is difficult considering the numerous researches that have been done in this area. Essentially, the paper assesses the relationship between the excess return and the equity risk premium and draws attention to their interchangeable use in the finance literature. Existing literature is reviewed around possible theories explaining the equity premium puzzle and followed by the empirical evidence on the theories. Finally, this paper focuses on the problems of attaining consensus value and source of the market risk premium, which makes equity premium puzzle an unresolved issue among the academics and finance practitioners.

This article investigates the market reaction to a sample of announcements of business service outsourcing arrangements made by UK quoted companies between 1991 and 1997. Event study methodology is applied to daily stock returns to measure the reaction, in the form of excess returns, immediately prior to and at the date of an outsourcing contract announcement. The conclusion is that initial announcements tend to enjoy positive and significant reaction and that the larger companies in the sample show a more positive reaction than smaller companies. Overall outsourcing announcements appear to be associated with excess returns but the absence of any recognized basis for disclosure prevents a complete analysis of such events.

The aim of this paper is to present a linkage between the real economy (micro and macro) and the financial economy. This relationship is obtained from the non-arbitrage valuation of equities framework. The paper also investigates if this theoretical relationship is actually observed. For this purpose, it proposes and tests an empirical model for excess returns that includes the linkage as a crucial element. The actual observation of the linkage could be of special importance for the financial economics discipline, since it presents several features that are not usually seen in other asset pricing or macro-finance models: (a) the relationship is explicit and does not depend on the estimation of free parameters; (b) it is derived under arbitrage free arguments and does not introduce subjective concepts as utility function or risk aversion; and (c) it explains the observed level of equity risk premium without entering in contradiction with its theoretical foundations. The conclusions of the performed tests are in favor of the concepts provided by the framework, meaning that further research could offer an alternative understanding of the behavior of financial markets and their connection with the real economy.

In this chapter, we review econometric methodology that is used to test for jumps and to decompose realized volatility into continuous and jump components. In order to illustrate how to implement the methods discussed, we also present the results of an empirical analysis in which we separate continuous asset return variation and finite activity jump variation from excess returns on various US market sector exchange traded funds (ETFs), during and around the Great Recession of 2008. Our objective is to characterize the financial contagion that was present during one of the greatest financial crises in US history. In particular, we study how shocks, as measured by jumps, propagate through nine different market sectors. One element of our analysis involves the investigation of causal linkages associated with jumps (via use of vector autoregressions), and another involves the examination of the predictive content of jumps for excess returns. We find that as early as 2006, jump spillover effects became more pronounced in the markets. We also observe that jumps had a significant effect on excess returns during 2008 and 2009; but not in the years before and after the recession.