This paper examines the empirical question of whether systematic equity risk of U.S. firms as measured by beta from the Capital Asset Pricing Model reflects the risk of their pension plans. There are a number of reasons to suspect that it might not. Chief among them is the opaque set of...

Does information asymmetry affect the cross-section of expected stock returns? We explore this question using representative portfolio holdings data from the Shanghai Stock Exchange. We show that institutional investors have a strong information advantage, and that past aggressiveness of...

Morck, Yeung and Yu (MYY, 2000) show that R2 and other measures of stock market synchronicity are higher in countries with less developed financial systems and poorer corporate governance. MYY and Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel and Xu (2001) also find a secular decline in R2 in the United States over...

This paper employs heterogeneity in institutional shareholder tax characteristics to identify the relationship between firm payout policy and tax incentives. Analysis of a panel of firms matched with the tax characteristics of the clients of their institutional shareholders indicates that...

Most of the economic analyses of the overseas-Chinese network focus on trade and investment flows at the country level. In this paper, we analyze the effects of the ethnic Chinese network at the firm level. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we find that ethnic-Chinese FDI firms in China in...

Using holdings data on a representative sample of all Shanghai Stock Exchange investors, we show that increases in ownership breadth (the fraction of market participants who own a stock) predict low returns: highest change quintile stocks underperform lowest quintile stocks by 23% per year....

This paper proposes a new approach to improve the way central banks can analyze and manage the financial risks of a national economy. It is based on the modern theory and practice of contingent claims analysis (CCA), which is successfully used today at the level of individual banks by managers,...

The high cost of international economic and financial crises highlights the need for a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of national economic and financial systems. This paper proposes a new comprehensive approach to measure, analyze, and manage macroeconomic risk based on the...

This paper proposes a functional approach to designing and managing the financial systems of countries, regions, firms, households, and other entities. It is a synthesis of the neoclassical, neo-institutional, and behavioral perspectives. Neoclassical theory is an ideal driver to link science...

The treatment of the stock market in finance and macroeconomics exemplifies many of the important differences in perspective between the two fields. In finance, the stock market is the single most important market with respect to corporate investment decisions. In contrast, macroeconomic...