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Recent work on econometric detection mechanisms has shown the effectiveness of recursive procedures in identifying and dating financial bubbles in real time. These procedures are useful as warning alerts in surveillance strategies conducted by central banks and fiscal regulators with real-time data. Use of these methods over long historical periods presents a more serious econometric challenge due to the complexity of the nonlinear structure and break mechanisms that are inherent in multiple-bubble phenomena within the same sample period. To meet this challenge, this article develops a new recursive flexible window method that is better suited for practical implementation with long historical time series. The method is a generalized version of the sup augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) test of Phillips et al. (\"Explosive behavior in the 1990s NASDAQ: When did exuberance escalate asset values?\" International Economic Review 52 (2011), 201–26; PWY) and delivers a consistent real-time date-stamping strategy for the origination and termination of multiple bubbles. Simulations show that the test significantly improves discriminatory power and leads to distinct power gains when multiple bubbles occur. An empirical application of the methodology is conducted on S&P 500 stock market data over a long historical period from January 1871 to December 2010. The new approach successfully identifies the well-known historical episodes of exuberance and collapses over this period, whereas the strategy of PWY and a related cumulative sum (CUSUM) dating procedure locate far fewer episodes in the same sample range.

Using estimators of the variation of positive and negative returns (realized semivariances) and high-frequency data for the S&P 500 Index and 105 individual stocks, this paper sheds new light on the predictability of equity price volatility. We show that future volatility is more strongly related to the volatility of past negative returns than to that of positive returns and that the impact of a price jump on volatility depends on the sign of the jump, with negative (positive) jumps leading to higher (lower) future volatility. We show that models exploiting these findings lead to significantly better out-of-sample forecast performance.

Research Summary: Research exploring investor reactions to sustainability has substantial empirical limitations, which we address with a large-scale longitudinal financial event study of the first global sustainability index, DJSI World. We examine investor reactions to firms from 27 countries over 17 years that are added, deleted, or continue on the index. We find that once relevant controls and comparisons to observationally equivalent firms beyond the index are included, DJSI events have only limited significance and/or materiality. Nonetheless, investors' valuation of sustainability around the world has evolved over time, involving diminishing reactions to U.S. firms and increasing benefits, particularly of continuation on the index, over time. The study highlights the importance of careful analysis and longitudinal global samples in making inferences about the financial effects of social performance. Managerial Summary: The debate about how investors perceive corporate social responsibility (CSR) predates Milton Friedman's famous statement that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Although extensive research has studied whether sustainability contributes to financial performance, we have yet to understand whether investors believe it pays off. This financial event study of reactions to the addition, continuation, and deletion from DJSI World, the first global sustainability index, shows that investors care little about DJSI announcements. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that global assessments of sustainability are converging and that investors may increasingly be valuing continuation on the DJSI, suggesting that firms may gain at least limited benefits from reliable sustainability activities.

We document that an increase in short-horizon investors is associated with cuts to long-term investment and increased short-term earnings. This leads to temporary boosts in equity valuations that reverse over time. To estimate these effects, we use difference-in-differences regressions around firms’ additions to the Russell 2000, comparing firms with large and small increases in short-term ownership. We proxy for the presence of short-term investors using ownership by transient institutions. Our results suggest that short-term pressures by investors can lead to myopic firm behavior. This paper was accepted by Shiva Rajgopal, accounting .

We exploit an optional colocation upgrade at NASDAQ OMX Stockholm to assess how speed affects market liquidity. Liquidity improves for the overall market and even for noncolocated trading entities. We find that the upgrade is pursued mainly by participants who engage in market making. Those that upgrade use their enhanced speed to reduce their exposure to adverse selection and to relax their inventory constraints. In particular, the upgraded trading entities remain competitive at the best bid and offer even when their inventories are in their top decile. Our results suggest that increasing the speed of marketmaking participants benefits market liquidity.

This article shows that, for major equity markets, the proportion of index values attributable to the first 5 years of dividends dropped substantially in the first quarter of 2020 and that this drop was not reversed by the end of the year. In the cross section, this breakdown of dividend smoothing due to COVID-19 was less severe for firms with higher operating cash flows and more positively coskewed stock returns, and it was more pronounced for those with higher leverage and in the financial sector. Heavy dividend cutters also experienced a substantial increase in exposure to systematic risk.

This paper investigates whether and how emerging markets reward firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. We focus on the socially responsible investment (SRI) index, which lists the top CSR performers and serves as a tool to help investors make investment decisions based on financial and social criteria. We empirically test the financial market responses to the announcements of pioneering SRI indices recently launched in Brazil, China, and South Africa. We find that inclusion on an SRI index in these markets is associated with positive abnormal returns. However, inclusion on an SRI index does not benefit all firms equally: the positive financial response is strengthened by R&D expenditures but weakened by advertising expenditures; it is stronger for firms that have expanded globally to developing countries than those to developed countries.

We consider an economy populated by institutional investors alongside standard retail investors. Institutions care about their performance relative to a certain index. Our framework is tractable, admitting exact closed-form expressions, and produces the following analytical results. We find that institutions tilt their portfolios towards stocks that compose their benchmark index. The resulting price pressure boosts index stocks. By demanding more risky stocks than retail investors, institutions amplify the index stock volatilities and aggregate stock market volatility and give rise to countercyclical Sharpe ratios. Trades by institutions induce excess correlations among stocks that belong to their benchmark, generating an asset-class effect.

We use exogenous scheduling of Wall Street Journal columnists to identify a causal relation between financial reporting and stock market performance. To measure the media's unconditional effect, we add columnist fixed effects to a daily regression of excess Dow Jones Industrial Average returns. Relative to standard control variables, these fixed effects increase the R² by about 35%, indicating each columnist's average persistent \"bullishness\" or \"bearishness.\" To measure the media's conditional effect, we interact columnist fixed effects with lagged returns. This increases explanatory power by yet another one-third, and identifies amplification or attenuation of prevailing sentiment as a tool used by financial journalists.

We examine the role of algorithmic traders (ATs) in liquidity supply and demand in the 30 Deutscher Aktien Index stocks on the Deutsche Boerse in Jan. 2008. ATs represent 52% of market order volume and 64% of nonmarketable limit order volume. ATs more actively monitor market liquidity than human traders. ATs consume liquidity when it is cheap (i.e., when the bid-ask quotes are narrow) and supply liquidity when it is expensive. When spreads are narrow ATs are less likely to submit new orders, less likely to cancel their orders, and more likely to initiate trades. ATs react more quickly to events and even more so when spreads are wide.