Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

The increasing participation of retail investors — generally having limited risk bearing ability — in mutual funds, has surprisingly not motivated rigorous examination of downside risks-forward return relationship of these funds, which this study aims to accomplish.

We use a survivorship-bias free database of returns and portfolio holdings of Indian equity mutual funds covering the period April 2008–November 2018 with Cornish–Fisher expansion of Value-at-Risk (VaR) as a measure of downside risk to examine downside risk-forward return relationship controlling for the fund characteristics such as age, size and style. To complete the story, we also test for the presence of Downside Risk Timing (DRT) ability of fund managers.

We find that downside risk does predict future returns of mutual funds and the result holds across different fund sizes, age and styles, particularly strongly in large and midcap style. We also find that the fund manager of the median fund exhibits positive DRT at the 1- and 6-month horizons and negative at the 3- and 12-month horizons. The mixed evidence on DRT suggests that fund managers either did not possess the requisite risk-timing ability or had failed in its application. Findings have important implications for both investors and fund managers.

We examine how family-ownership influences takeover probability and takeover public announcement abnormal return of Indian publicly traded firms between 2003 and 2019. We find that family ownership has a significantly negative effect on target takeover probability at various levels of family ownership, viz. 20%, 40%, and 51%. Announcement period abnormal returns for target firms are positive at a lower level of family ownership of 20% and negative at a higher level of family ownership of 51%. These results are consistent with the agency cost explanation where family ownership reduces owner-manager agency conflict but exacerbates conflict between majority and minority shareholders. Our results hold for Heckman two-stage model.

We reinvestigate the major factors in the low origination rate of home equity conversion mortgages (HECMs) in the United States from 2010 to 2017. We use panel data analysis to consider the variation in time and region and investigate the main determinants of the HECM origination rate. We examine five categories of variables: demographics, home equity, home debt level, retirement income, and taxes. We first filter out key variables and then consider the interactions among these factors. The empirical outcomes confirm the significance of including interactions and provide detailed observations to resolve several disputed issues and make policy recommendations, such as debt priority of mortgage and credit card, applying HECM as a personal or household decision, and the dominance of property tax over inheritance tax.

This study finds that the predictability of economic policy uncertainty on short-term reversals is stronger among stocks exposed more to the volatility index (VIX) and economic policy uncertainty index (EPU). In addition, the predictability of VIX on short-term reversals is stronger among stocks exposed more to this index and the Aruoba–Diebold–Scotti business conditions index (ADS). Furthermore, the finding is robust after controlling for the other popular investor sentiment indexes, the Fama–French five risk factors, financial crises, and firm size.

This study examines the impact of investor attention on the fund inflows and survival of newly issued equity and bond funds. We employ the residual search volume index (RSVI) from Google Trends to directly measure investor attention to a mutual fund. We find that the RSVI is positively related to fund inflows for both new equity and bond funds. However, the RSVI is only positively related to the probability of survival for new equity funds, not for new bond funds. These results suggest that in addition to traditional channels such as advertising and sales forces, the Internet can serve as an alternative and effective tool for marketing and product distribution in the mutual fund industry.

This paper aims to empirically examine whether the negative impact of greenhouse gas emissions and energy use disclosures alleviates or exacerbates the positive impact of an overall Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure while determining the performance-based CEO pay. A total of 67 companies listed in the NSE Nifty 100 ESG index spanning six years from 2014 to 2019 have been taken as the data sample. As a baseline methodology, the Panel Corrected Standard Errors model is applied and a further two-step system GMM model has been considered for robustness check. ESG disclosure scores show a significant positive effect on the pay–performance relationship, while its interaction with the emissions/ energy use disclosure index gives a negative impact. The results indicate that the significant positive effect of ESG disclosure scores cannot reinforce the negative impact of emissions or energy use while ascertaining the performance-based CEO compensation.

Technical analysis helps investors to better time their entry and exit from financial asset positions. This methodology relies solely on past information on financial assets price and volumes to predict a financial asset’s future price trend. Modern research has established that combined with other sentiment measures such as social media, it can outperform the standard buy and hold strategy. Moreover, it has been documented that novice and professional investors technical analysis in their investing strategy. An experienced investor should combine fundamental analysis and technical analysis for better trading results. Programmers use technical analysis to create algorithmic trading systems that learn and adapt to the changing trading environments and perform trading accordingly without human involvement. There are hundreds of technical tools offered by known trading platforms. investors must use specific tools that fit their trading style and risk adoption. Moreover, different financial assets such as stocks, exchange trade funds (ETFs), cryptocurrency, futures, and commodities demand different sets of tools. Furthermore, investors should use these tools according to the time frame they use for trading. This paper will discuss different technical tools that are used to help traders of different time frames and different financial assets to achieve better returns over the traditional buy and hold strategy.

This paper investigates whether corporate political connections and corporate donations to national-level political campaigns are associated with the allocation of government resources. Based on a sample of Taiwanese publicly held companies, the findings show that political campaign contributions are associated with successful applications for government innovation subsidies as well as more government innovation subsidies. The findings also show that companies that show their loyalty by only donating to the ruling party’s candidates in campaigns receive higher amounts of government innovation subsidies than other companies. Overall, the findings provide evidence that political connections through political campaign contributions may affect government’s decision for resource allocation.