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This study examines how housing sector volatilities affect real estate investment trust (REIT) equity return in the United States. I argue that unexpected changes in housing variables can be a source of aggregate housing risk, and the first principal component extracted from the volatilities of U.S. housing variables can predict the expected REIT equity returns. I propose and construct a factor-based housing risk index as an additional factor in asset price models that uses the time-varying conditional volatility of housing variables within the U.S. housing sector. The findings show that the proposed housing risk index is economically and theoretically consistent with the risk-return relationship of Merton's conditional Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM) (1973), which predicts an average maximum of 1.83 percent of annual housing risk premium in REIT equity return. Moreover, the housing risk index explains a significant portion of the cross-sectional variation of sectoral REIT returns. In cross-section, the positive risk-return relationship remains significant after controlling for VIX, Fama–French four factors, and a broad set of macroeconomic and financial variables. I also find that the proposed housing beta accurately forecasts U.S. macroeconomic and financial conditions.

The multifaceted interrelationship between petroleum prices and equity markets has been a subject of immense interest. The current paper offers an extensive review of a plethora of empirical studies in this strand of literature. By scrutinising over 190 papers published from 1983 to 2023, our survey reveals various research themes and points to diverse findings that are sector- and country-specific and contingent on employed methodologies, data frequencies, and time horizons. More precisely, petroleum price changes and shocks exert direct or indirect effects dictated by the level of petroleum dependency across sectors and the country’s position as a net petroleum exporter or importer. The interlinkages tend to display a time-varying nature and sensitivity to major market events. In addition, volatility is not solely spilled from petroleum to equity markets; it is also observed to transmit in the reverse direction. The importance of incorporating asymmetries is documented. Lastly, the summarised findings can serve as the basis for further research and reveal valuable insights to market participants.

Correlations of equity returns have varied substantially over time and remain a source of continuing policy debate. This paper studies stock market correlations in an equilibrium model with heterogeneous risk aversion. In the model, preference heterogeneity causes variations in the volatility of aggregate risk aversion from good to bad states. At times of high volatility in aggregate risk aversion, which is a common factor in returns, we see high correlations. The model matches average industry return correlations and changes in correlations from business cycle peaks to troughs and replicates the dynamics of expected excess returns and standard deviations. Model-implied aggregate risk aversion explains average industry correlations, expected excess returns, standard deviations, and turnover volatility in the data. We find supportive evidence for the model’s prediction that industries with low dividend-consumption correlation have low average return correlation but experience disproportional increases in return correlations in recessions. This paper was accepted by Jerome Detemple, finance .

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of various factors on the level of non-performing loans (NPL) and, to determine the moderating role of efficiency on the relationship between different factors and NPL in China. The current study addressed four important factors to examine the role in relation to the NPL. These factors include; return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), economic sustainability and political instability index. Furthermore, the moderating role of efficiency is addressed between these factors and NPL. Secondary data is used in this study to consider the empirical results. Secondary data related to ROA, ROE, economic sustainability and political instability index is collected from different sources. Consistent with the literature, we found significant effect of ROA, ROE, economic sustainability and political instability index on NPL. Banking sector of China is majorly influenced by these factors due to the effect on NPLs. Furthermore, the efficiency has contribution to the NPLs as moderating variable. Results of this study are helpful for the management of banking industry to resolve various issues related to NPLs.

Recent international studies on CEO pay in Europe, Japan, and South Korea reveal significant differences from the U.S. in the use and effectiveness of equity-based CEO compensation, raising questions about the ability of conventional contracts based on agency theory to align with actual CEO compensation practices. Our study contributes to this debate by evaluating nine hypotheses from an extended principal–agent framework in which CEO equity and cash incentives are jointly determined in the shareholder return-maximizing contract. The extended model also incorporates the noisy market valuation relationship between firm income and its market equity value, and distinguishes between firm ‘business risk’ and ‘equity risk’. Our empirical results show that CEO cash incentives increase with firm growth prospects and equity risk and decline with firm business risk and firm scale as predicted by the model; meanwhile, CEO equity incentives are partially consistent. Overall, given the dominance of equity compensation in U.S. CEO pay, our results show that cash pay tied to firm business performance (e.g., operating cash flow) is efficient and plays an important role in aligning CEO and shareholder interests and reducing corporate governance risks associated with agency misalignment.

This study investigates how economic and political uncertainty spillovers influence corporate equity volatility in Vietnam. Using dynamic panel estimators addressing endogeneity, the study shows that uncertainties from advanced, emerging, and low-income countries markedly amplify stock return volatility in Vietnam. Similarly, uncertainty from Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere exerts destabilizing effects. However, some of these effects are only significant under an estimator accounting for endogeneity and the dynamic structure of panel data. The study also examines firm-level heterogeneity, which shows that corporate liquidity reduces exposure to spillovers from low-income economies and Africa while government ownership buffers the impact of uncertainty from Asia-Pacific. The findings provide valuable insights for investors, corporations, and policymakers when formulating decisions under the influence of uncertainty spillovers.

In this paper, we develop new latent risk measures that are designed as a prior synthesis of key forecasting information associated with financial market contagion. These measures are based on the decomposition (using high-frequency financial data) of the quadratic covariation between two assets into continuous and jump components. We also examine the usefulness of a large variety of machine learning methods for forecasting equity returns at market and sector levels. In addition to constructing predictions using standard machine learning methods, we also investigate the predictive performance of a group of hybrid machine learning methods that combine least absolute shrinkage operator and neural network methods. We demonstrate that the novel latent measures significantly reduce the MSFE when added into candidate machine learning models and are dominant predictive signals based on variable importance analysis, suggesting that the latent measures constructed using high-frequency financial data are useful for predicting returns. Overall, at the monthly frequency, we find that machine learning methods significantly improve forecasting performance relative to the random walk and linear benchmark alternatives, when comparing mean square forecast error (MSFE), and when implementing Diebold-Mariano (DM) predictive accuracy test. The “best” method is the random forest method, which “wins” in almost all permutations, across all of the “target” variables that we predict. It is also worth noting that our hybrid machine learning methods often outperform individual methods.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanism of transmitting economic policy uncertainty (EPU) shocks to capital structure.Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopt a novel approach that bridges the asset pricing implications of EPU and the debt-financing decisions of Chinese firms by introducing a variable “policy-risk-induced equity return” (PRER). PRER is the product of the EPU beta and the EPU shock. Differentiating firms as per the signs of the EPU beta helps to shed light on the deep questions of whether their respective leverage targets and speeds of adjustment are different and how the targets and speeds are determined.FindingsThe empirical evidence shows that it is the equity market that channels EPU shocks to capital structure through PRER in China. Firms with positive (negative) EPU betas have PRER impact negatively (positively) the leverage target, conforming to the market-timing theory. EPU and non-policy uncertainty shocks cause the speed of adjustment to change over time. Overall, the intertemporal relation between EPU and leverage is negative. These results are robust to alternative leverage measures and after controlling for non-policy uncertainty shocks and conventional firm characteristics and have implications for academic research, policymaking, market stability, and corporate financing.Originality/valueThis study is the first to probe for, and provide insights into, the underlying reason why EPU impacts capital structure by connecting asset pricing to corporate financing for a large sample of Chinese publicly traded firms.

With reference to Ohlson' model, we optimise earnings persistence model and express earnings persistence measure as a function of return on equity (R.O.E.), dividends payout ratio and other factors. Our theoretical model reveals that dividends payout ratio has little effect on the earnings persistence, while R.O.E. has a decisive effect on earnings persistence. Using quarterly earnings data of 872 listed firms in China over 2011-2020, we calculate the Revised Persistence value of earnings (RPer value) of our earnings persistence model, and find that the Rper value of our model have more explanatory power than that of Kormendi and Lipe' model. Our study also suggest that quarterly earnings are useful and have information content. Both the theoretical model and empirical results of our research are of great significance to understand and support the implementation of semi-compulsory cash dividends rules in China.

Purpose This study aims to investigate the impact of the accounting and auditing organisation for Islamic financial institution (AAOIFI) governance disclosure on the performance of Islamic banks (IBs). Design/methodology/approach The ordinary least squares regression model was used to test the impact of AAOIFI governance disclosure on the performance of 126 IBs from 8 countries that mandatorily adopt the AAOIFI standards for three years (2013–2015). In this regression model, return on asset (ROA) and return on equity (ROE) are the dependent variables, while AAOIFI governance disclosure is the independent variable. Corporate governance mechanisms, firm characteristics, year dummy and country dummy are used as control variables. Findings This paper found an insignificant relationship between AAOIFI governance disclosure and IBs performance. Research limitations/implications This study highlighted the implication that the current research may help IBs and encourage them to disclose more information in annual reports, especially those related to AAOIFI governance standards because following good corporate governance leads to good financial performance. The major limitation of the paper is that it is only focussed on two measurements of bank performance – ROA and ROE; it would be good to use other firm performance measures, such as profit margin. Originality/value This study provides new empirical evidence on the impact of AAOIFI governance disclosure on IBs performance.