Matching Items (38)
Description
Schennach (2007) has shown that the Empirical Likelihood (EL) estimator may not be asymptotically normal when a misspecified model is estimated. This problem occurs because the empirical probabilities of individual observations are restricted to be positive. I find that even the EL estimator computed without the restriction can fail to be asymptotically normal for misspecified models if the sample moments weighted by unrestricted empirical probabilities do not have finite population moments. As a remedy for this problem, I propose a group of alternative estimators which I refer to as modified EL (MEL) estimators. For correctly specified models, these estimators have the same higher order asymptotic properties as the EL estimator. The MEL estimators are obtained by the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) applied to an exactly identified model. The simulation results provide promising evidence for these estimators. In the second chapter, I introduce an alternative group of estimators to the Generalized Empirical Likelihood (GEL) family. The new group is constructed by employing demeaned moment functions in the objective function while using the original moment functions in the constraints. This designation modifies the higher-order properties of estimators. I refer to these new estimators as Demeaned Generalized Empirical Likelihood (DGEL) estimators. Although Newey and Smith (2004) show that the EL estimator in the GEL family has fewer sources of bias and is higher-order efficient after bias-correction, the demeaned exponential tilting (DET) estimator in the DGEL group has those superior properties. In addition, if data are symmetrically distributed, every estimator in the DGEL family shares the same higher-order properties as the best member.
ContributorsXiang, Jin (Author) / Ahn, Seung (Thesis advisor) / Wahal, Sunil (Thesis advisor) / Bharath, Sreedhar (Committee member) / Mehra, Rajnish (Committee member) / Tserlukevich, Yuri (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This paper examines dealers' inventory holding periods and the associated price markups on corporate bonds from 2003 to 2010. Changes in these measures explain a large part of the time series variation in aggregate corporate bond prices. In the cross-section, holding periods and markups overshadow extant liquidity measures and have significant explanatory power for individual bond prices. Both measures shed light on the credit spread puzzle: changes in credit spread are positively correlated with changes in holding periods and markups, and a large portion of credit spread changes is explained by them. The economic effects of holding periods and markups are particularly sharp during crisis periods.
ContributorsQian, Zhiyi (Author) / Wahal, Sunil (Thesis advisor) / Bharath, Sreedhar (Committee member) / Coles, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Mehra, Rajnish (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This paper looks at defined contribution 401(k) plans in the United States to analyze whether or not participants have plans with better plan characteristics defined in this study by paying more for administration services, advisory services, and investments. By collecting and analyzing Form 5500 and audit data, I find that there is no relation between how much a plan and its participants are paying for recordkeeping, advisory, and investment fees and the analyzed characteristics of the plan that they receive in regards to active/passive allocation, revenue share, and the performance of the funds.
ContributorsAziz, Julian (Author) / Wahal, Sunil (Thesis director) / Bharath, Sreedhar (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This report is a summary of a long-term project completed by Ido Gilboa for his Honors Thesis. The purpose of this project is to determine if an arbitrage between different crypto-currency exchanges exists, and if it is possible to acts upon such triangular arbitrage. Bitcoin, the specific crypto-currency this report focuses on, has become a household name, yet most do not understand its origin and patterns. The report will detail the process of collecting data from different sources, manipulating it in order to run the algorithms, explain the meaning behind the algorithms, results and important statistics found, and conclusion of the project. In addition to that, the report will go into detail discussing financial terms such as triangular arbitrage as well as information system concepts such as sockets and server communication. The project was completed with the assistance of Dr. Sunil Wahal and Dr. Daniel Mazzola, professors in the W.P. Carey School of business. This project has been stretched over along period of time, spanning from early 2013 to fall of 2015.
ContributorsGilboa, Ido (Author) / Wahal, Sunil (Thesis director) / Mazzola, Daniel (Committee member) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have increasingly been used in finance, accounting, and economics research to analyze text-based information more efficiently and effectively than primarily human-centered methods. The literature is rich with computational textual analysis techniques applied to consistent annual or quarterly financial fillings, with promising results to identify similarities between documents and firms, in addition to further using this information in relation to other economic phenomena. Building upon the knowledge gained from previous research and extending the application of NLP methods to other categories of financial documents, this project explores financial credit contracts, better understanding the information provided through their textual data by assessing patterns and relationships between documents and firms. The main methods used throughout this project is Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (to represent each document as a numerical vector), Cosine Similarity (to measure the similarity between contracts), and K-Means Clustering (to organically derive clusters of documents based on the text included in the contract itself). Using these methods, the dimensions analyzed are various grouping methodologies (external industry classifications and text derived classifications), various granularities (document-wise and firm-wise), various financial documents associated with a single firm (the relationship between credit contracts and 10-K product descriptions), and how various mean cosine similarity distributions change over time.
ContributorsLiu, Jeremy J (Author) / Wahal, Sunil (Thesis director) / Bharath, Sreedhar (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School for the Future of Innovation in Society (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the history of the Bitcoin arbitrage premium to see if the possibility of 'risk-free' gains existed previously and whether or not the opportunity is still present today. It investigates market structure and price discrepancies in $147B of trading volume across 53 different exchanges between July 2010 and February 2017. This paper aggregates exchange trading into five minute buckets of transaction volume in order to see what exchange volume could have been successfully arbitraged within the context of two cases. The first requires trades to close within the same 5-minute interval and the second requires a 10-minute delay before the position is closed. It finds that the monthly average spreads of these cases have fallen below 3% in 2017 from nearly 10% in 2010. Once exchange fees are included, these spreads fall below 2% on average.
ContributorsNowicki, Gregory Arthur (Author) / Wahal, Sunil (Thesis director) / Simonson, Mark (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
This dissertation consists of two essays. The essay “Is Capital Reallocation Really Procyclical?” studies the cyclicality of corporate asset reallocation and its implication for aggregate productivity efficiency. Empirically, aggregate reallocation is procyclical. This is puzzling given the documented evidence that the benefits of reallocation are countercyclical. I show that this procyclicality is driven entirely by the reallocation of bundled capital (e.g., business divisions), which is highly correlated with market valuations and is unrelated to measures of productivity dispersion. In contrast, reallocation of unbundled capital (e.g., specific machinery or equipment) is countercyclical and highly correlated with dispersion in productivity growth. To gauge the aggregate productivity impact of bundled transactions, I propose a heterogeneous agentmodel of investment featuring two distinct used-capital markets as well as a sentiment component. In equilibrium, unbundled capital is reallocated for productivity gains, whereas bundled capital is also reallocated for real, or perceived, synergies in the equity market. While equity overvaluation negatively affects aggregate productivity by encouraging excessive trading of capital, its adverse impact is largely offset by its positive externality on asset liquidity in the unbundled capital market. The second essay “The Profitability of Liquidity Provision” studies the profitability of liquidity provision in the US equity market. By tracking the cumulative inventory position of all passive liquidity providers and matching each aggregate position with its offsetting trade, I construct a measure of profits to liquidity provision (realized profitability) and assess how profitability varies with the average time to offset. Using a sample of all common stocks from 2017 to 2020, I show that there is substantial variation in the horizon at which trades are turned around even for the same stock. As a
mark-to-market profit, the conventional realized spread—measured with a prespecified horizon—can deviate significantly from the realized profits to liquidity provision both in the cross-section and in the time series. I further show that, consistent with the risk-return tradeoff faced by liquidity providers as a whole, realized profitability is low for trades that are quickly turned around and high for trades that take longer to reverse.
ContributorsYang, Lingyan (Author) / Wahal, Sunil (Thesis advisor) / Boguth, Oliver (Thesis advisor) / Tserlukevich, Yuri (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This dissertation consists of two essays. The first, titled “Sweep Order and the Cost of Market Fragmentation” takes a “revealed-preference” approach towards gauging the effects of market fragmentation by documenting the implicit costs borne by traders looking to avoid executing in a fragmented environment. I show that traders use Intermarket Sweep Orders (ISO) to trade “as-if” markets were single-venued and pay a premium to do so. Using a sample of over 2,600 securities over the period January 2019 to April 2021, this premium amounts to 1.3 bps on average (or 40%of the effective spread), amounting to a total of $3 billion over the sample period. I find a positive, robust, and significant relationship between the premium and different measures of market fragmentation, further supporting the interpretation of the premium as a cost of market fragmentation. The second essay, titled “The Profitability of Liquidity Provision” investigates the relationship between the profits realized from providing liquidity and the amount of time it takes liquidity providers to reverse their positions. By tracking the cumulative inventory position of all passive liquidity providers in the US equity market and matching each aggregate position with its offsetting trade, I construct a measure of profits to liquidity provision (realized profitability) and assess how profitability varies with the average time to offset. Using a sample of all common stocks from 2017 to 2020, I show that there is substantial variation in the horizon at which trades are turned around even for the same stock. As a mark-to-market profit, the conventional realized spread—measured with a prespecified horizon—can deviate significantly from the realized profits to liquidity provision both in the cross-section and in the time-series. I further show that, consistent with the risk-return tradeoff faced by liquidity providers as a whole, realized profitability is low for trades that are quickly turned around and high for trades that take longer to reverse.
ContributorsLohr, Ariel (Author) / Bessembinder, Hendrik (Thesis advisor) / Wahal, Sunil (Committee member) / Aragon, George (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This paper studies the dynamic relationship between the pricing of Alternative Asset Management products and macroeconomic variables. It does so using an index of Alternative Asset Management products, employing a VAR framework and examining the implied impulse response functions. I find a bivariate causal relation between the expected rate of return on Alternative Asset Management products and the growth rate of industrial value added. I also find that the CPI, the yield on one-year national debt, the weighted average yield of bond repurchases in interbank bond market, and the one-year loan interest rate can influence the expected return rate of Alternative Asset Management products. An analysis of the variance decomposition suggests that macroeconomic variables have a different impacts on forecast errors variance.
ContributorsHuang, Jianxian (Author) / Wahal, Sunil (Thesis advisor) / Chang, Chun (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Peggy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Given the "New Nine Measures" for capital market reform, a policy document issued by the State Council of China, the development of markets for interest rate derivatives, such as treasury futures, becomes an increasingly important task. Several shortcomings of the existing treasury futures market have been noted: including low market liquidity, singular investor composition, restrict contract terms, and low hedging demand.
This study contributes to a better understanding of the treasury futures market by analyzing changes in China treasury futures market regulations and their impact on market liquidity of treasury futures. Found that compared with the mature market, China treasury futures market exists liquidity shortage, the trading system, market structure and the division of regulatory are factors which influence the liquidity of China treasury futures market.
This study found that reducing transaction costs for further optimization of the width and depth of China treasury futures market are not obvious by using quantitative analysis method, expanding the smallest change price can optimize the market depth, reducing transaction costs and expanding smallest change price can optimize the immediacy, volume and hosting amount. In addition, the bond market will also influence the treasury futures market, the price fluctuations and the morphology of the yield curve of bond market have significant influence on width, depth and holdings of market.
The system of China treasury futures market needs to be optimized by expanding the smallest change price and reducing transaction costs. The market structure needs to be optimized by establishing unified bond market and enriching investor structure.
These findings have significant theoretical and practical implications. The study also provides policy recommendations for the design and establishment of treasury futures market to the regulatory agencies.
This study contributes to a better understanding of the treasury futures market by analyzing changes in China treasury futures market regulations and their impact on market liquidity of treasury futures. Found that compared with the mature market, China treasury futures market exists liquidity shortage, the trading system, market structure and the division of regulatory are factors which influence the liquidity of China treasury futures market.
This study found that reducing transaction costs for further optimization of the width and depth of China treasury futures market are not obvious by using quantitative analysis method, expanding the smallest change price can optimize the market depth, reducing transaction costs and expanding smallest change price can optimize the immediacy, volume and hosting amount. In addition, the bond market will also influence the treasury futures market, the price fluctuations and the morphology of the yield curve of bond market have significant influence on width, depth and holdings of market.
The system of China treasury futures market needs to be optimized by expanding the smallest change price and reducing transaction costs. The market structure needs to be optimized by establishing unified bond market and enriching investor structure.
These findings have significant theoretical and practical implications. The study also provides policy recommendations for the design and establishment of treasury futures market to the regulatory agencies.
ContributorsMa, Jun (Author) / Gu, Bin (Thesis advisor) / Chen, Hong (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Tan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016