Finance Papers

Asset pricing techniques, widely used in corporations, banks, and stock and bond markets, have undergone radical changes over the last 20 years

Modern theories of portfolio choice and savings behavior have provided the basis for the innovation of these models, and Wharton’s Finance Department has remained at the forefront of these developments.

The Finance Department has four areas of specialization:

  • Banking and Financial Institutions, which entails the overall economic context affecting a firm’s investments
  • Corporate Finance, concentrating on the financing and investment activities of an organization
  • Financial Instruments and Portfolio Management, which examines financial instruments and their market behavior
  • International Finance, exploring the impact of such issues as foreign currency options and exchange rates parity on the multinational corporation

 

Search results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 422
  • Publication
    Determinants and Outcomes of Internet Banking Adoption
    (2011-02-01) Xue, Mei; Hitt, Lorin M; Chen, Pei-yu
    This paper examines the drivers of adoption of Internet banking and the linkages among adoption drivers and outcomes (product acquisition, service activity, profitability, loyalty). We relate Internet banking adoption to customer demand for banking services, the availability of alternative channels, customers' efficiency in service coproduction (“customer efficiency”), and local Internet banking penetration. We find that customers who have greater transaction demand and higher efficiency, and reside in areas with a greater density of online banking adopters, are faster to adopt online banking after controlling for time, regional, and individual characteristics. Consistent with prior work, we find that customers significantly increase their banking activity, acquire more products, and perform more transactions. These changes in behavior are not associated with short-run increases in customer profitability, but customers who adopt online banking have a lower propensity to leave the bank. Building on these observations we also find that the adoption drivers are linked to the postadoption changes in behavior or profitability. Customers who live in areas with a high branch density or high Internet banking penetration increase their product acquisition and transaction activity more than Internet banking adopters in other regions. Efficient customers and those with high service demand show greater postadoption profitability.
  • Publication
    On the Predictability of Stock Returns: An Asset-Allocation Perspective
    (1996) Kandel, Shmuel; Stambaugh, Robert F
    Sample evidence about the predictability of monthly stock returns is considered from the perspective of a risk-averse Bayesian investor who must allocate funds between stocks and cash. The investor uses the sample evidence to update prior beliefs about the parameters in a regression of stock returns on a set of predictive variables. The regression relation can seem weak when described by usual statistical measures, but the current values of the predictive variables can exert a substantial influence on the investor's portfolio decision, even when the investor's prior beliefs are weighted against predictability.
  • Publication
    Anatomy of the Trading Process Empirical Evidence on the Behavior of Institutional Traders
    (1995) Keim, Donald B; Madhavan, Ananth
    This paper examines the behavior of institutional traders. We use unique data on the equity transactions of 21 institutions of differing investment styles which provide a detailed account of the anatomy of the trading process. The data include information on the number of days needed to fill an order and types of order placement strategies employed. We analyze the motivations for trade, the determinants of trade duration, and the choice of order type. The analysis provides some support for the predictions made by theoretical models, but suggests that these models fail to capture important dimensions of trading behavior.
  • Publication
    Predicting Returns in the Stock and Bond Markets
    (1986) Keim, Donald B; Stambaugh, Robert F
    Several predetermined variables that reflect levels of bond and stock prices appear to predict returns on common stocks of firms of various sizes, long-term bonds of various default risks, and default-free bonds of various maturities. The returns on small-firm stocks and low-grade bonds are more highly correlated in January than in the rest of the year with previous levels of asset prices, especially prices of small-firm stocks. Seasonality is found in several conditional risk measures, but such seasonality is unlikely to explain, and in some cases is opposite to, the seasonal found in mean returns.
  • Publication
    Optimal Consumption Choices for a ‘Large’ Investor
    (1998) Cuoco, Domenico; Cvitanić, Jakša
    This paper examines the optimal consumption and investment problem for a ‘large’ investor, whose portfolio choices affect the instantaneous expected returns on the traded assets. Alternatively, our analysis can be interpreted in terms of an optimal growth problem with nonlinear technologies. Existence of optimal policies is established using martingale and duality techniques under general assumptions on the securities' price process and the investor's preferences. As an illustration of our characterization result, explicit solutions are provided for specific examples involving an agent with logarithmic utilities and a generalized two-factor version of the CCAPM is derived. The analogy of the consumption problem examined in this paper to the consumption problem with constraints on the portfolio choices is emphasized.
  • Publication
    Asset Returns and Intertemporal Preferences
    (1991) Kandel, Shmuel; Stambaugh, Robert F
    A representative-agent model with time-varying moments of consumption growth is used to analyze implications about means and volatilities of asset returns as well as the predictability of asset returns for various investment horizons. A comparative-statics analysis using nonexpectedutility preferences indicates that, although risk aversion is important in determining the means of both equity returns and interest rates, implications about the volatility and the predictability of equity returns are affected primarily by intertemporal substitution. Lower elasticities of intertemporal substitution are associated with greater variance in the temporary component of equity prices.
  • Publication
    Costs of Equity Capital and Model Mispricing
    (1999) Pastor, Lubos; Stambaugh, Robert F
    Costs of equity for individual firms are estimated in a Bayesian framework using several factor-based pricing models. Substantial prior uncertainty about mispricing often produces an estimated cost of equity close to that obtained with mispricing precluded, even for a stock whose average return departs significantly from the pricing model's prediction. Uncertainty about which pricing model to use is less important, on average, than within-model parameter uncertainty. In the absence of mispricing uncertainty, uncertainty about factor premiums is generally the largest source of overall uncertainty about a firm's cost of equity, although uncertainty about betas is nearly as important.
  • Publication
    General Tests of Latent Variable Models and Mean-Variance Spanning
    (1993) Ferson, Wayne E; Foerster, Stephen R; Keim, Donald B
    The methods of Gibbons and Ferson (1985) are extended, relaxing the assumption that expected returns are linear functions of predetermined instruments. A model of conditional mean-variance spanning generalizes Huberman and Kandel (1987). The empirical results indicate that more than a single risk premium is needed to model expected stock and bond returns, but the number of common factors in the expected returns is small. However, when size-based common stock portfolios proxy for the risk factors, we reject the hypothesis that four of them describe the conditional expected returns of the other assets.
  • Publication
    Returns and Volatility of Low-Grade Bonds 1977–1989
    (1991) Blume, Marshall E; Keim, Donald B; Patel, Sandeep Anubhai
    This paper examines the risks and returns of long-term low-grade bonds for the period 1977–1989. We find: (1) low-grade bonds realized higher returns than higher-grade bonds and lower returns than common stocks, and low-grade bonds exhibited less volatility than higher-grade bonds due to their call features and high coupons; (2) there is no relation between the age of low-grade bonds and their realized returns; cyclical factors explain much of the observed relation between default rates and bond age; and (3) low-grade bonds behave like both bonds and stocks. Despite this complexity there is no evidence that low-grade bonds are systematically over- or under-priced.
  • Publication
    Borrowing Constraints During the Housing Bubble
    (2014-06-01) Barakova, Irina; Calem, Paul S; Wachter, Susan M
    The impact of borrowing constraints on homeownership has been well established in the literature. Wealth is most likely to restrict homeownership followed by credit and income. Using recent movers from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and borrowing constraint definitions commonly used in the literature, we examine the impact of these constraints on the probability of homeownership during the housing market boom between 2003 and 2007. We show that whereas the pool of financially constrained households expanded, the marginal impact of borrowing constraints associated with income and credit quality declined during this period. The constraint associated with wealth, however, continued to have a negative impact on homeownership status, all else equal. The fact that lending standards became less strict is accepted; however the impact of this on homeownership has not been previously studied. Here we find that less restrictive underwriting does appear to have reduced the impact of income and credit quality on homeownership but the impact of the wealth constraint persists.