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Author Pöschl Philipp Abweichender Titel laut Übersetzung der Verfasserin/des Verfassers Universität Linz, Masterarbeit, 2019 (VLID)4366257

This paper reports results from a series of laboratory experiments designed to evaluate the impact of exposure risk on market performance. Exposure risk arises when there are complementarities between trades, e.g. when the purchase of a new house requires selling the old one. The continuous double auction (CDA), which has proven to be remarkably effective in a wide variety of settings, performs poorly in a treatment with high exposure risk: overall market efficiency is only 20% and there are many instances of no trade. In a parallel treatment with lower exposure risk, efficiency under the CDA is higher (55%) but is dominated, for instance, by a top-trading-cycles procedure that uses no money. The CDA's poor performance does not depend on whether house values are private information or common knowledge, indicating that exposure risk is due to strategic uncertainty not objective uncertainty about others' preferences. We introduce a simple package market and show that it effectively resolves exposure risk: efficiency levels are 82% and 89% respectively for the low and high exposure treatments. The proposed package market is a simple extension of the CDA and could potentially be applied in a variety contexts.

Matthias Pachler Zsfassung in dt. und engl. Sprache Graz, Univ., Masterarb., 2012

Regulations in the pre-Sarbanes–Oxley era allowed corporate insiders considerable flexibility in strategically timing their trades and SEC filings, for example, by executing several trades and reporting them jointly after the last trade. We document that even these lax reporting requirements were frequently violated and that the strategic timing of trades and reports was common. Event study abnormal re-turns are larger after reports of strategic insider trades than after reports of otherwise similar nonstrategic trades. Our results also imply that delayed reporting is detrimental to market efficiency and lend strong support to the more stringent trade reporting requirements established by the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. JEL Classification: G14, G30, G32 Keywords: Insider Trading , Directors' Dealings , Corporate Governance , Market Efficiency

To explore why bubbles frequently emerge in the experimental asset market model of Smith, Suchanek and Williams (1988), we vary the fundamental value process (constant or declining) and the cash-to-asset value-ratio (constant or increasing). We observe high mispricing in treatments with a declining fundamental value, while overvaluation emerges when coupled with an increasing C/A-ratio. A questionnaire reveals that the declining fundamental value process confuses subjects, as they expect the fundamental value to stay constant.Running the experiment with a different context (stocks of a depletable gold mine instead of stocks) significantly reduces mispricing and overvaluation as it reduces confusion.

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a network. Frictions arise because workers typically do not know where other workers apply to and firms do not know which candidates other firms consider. The first coordination friction affects network formation, while the second coordination friction affects network clearing. We show that those frictions and the wage mechanism are in general not independent. The wage mechanism determines both the distribution of networks that can arise and the number of matches on a given network. Equilibria that exhibit wage dispersion are inefficient in terms of network formation. Under complete recall (firms can go back and forth between all their candidates) only wage mechanisms that allow for ex post Bertrand competition generate the maximum matching on a realized network.

We introduce financial frictions in a two sector model of international trade with heterogeneous agents. The level of specialization in the economy (economic development) depends on the quality of financial institutions. Underdeveloped financial markets prohibit an economy to specialize in sectors where finance is important. Capital flows and international trade are complements when countries differ in the degree of development of their financial sectors. Capital flows to countries with more robust financial institutions which in turn allow their economies to develop sectors that are financially dependent.

The authors study a simple model of an asset market with informed and non-informed agents. In the absence of non-informed agents, the market becomes information efficient when the number of traders with different private information is large enough. Upon introducing non-informed agents, the authors find that the latter contribute significantly to the trading activity if and only if the market is (nearly) information efficient. This suggests that information efficiency might be a necessary condition for bubble phenomena—induced by the behavior of non-informed traders—or conversely that throwing some sands in the gears of financial markets may curb the occurrence of bubbles.

Extending the controversial findings from the relevant literature, the results from the quarterly transaction-based Nationwide indices from 1974 to 2009 provide further empirical evidence on the rejection of the weak-form version of efficiency in the U.K. housing market. In addition to conducting parametric and non-parametric tests, we apply technical trading strategies to test whether or not the inefficiencies can be exploited by investors earning excess returns. The empirical findings from the technical trading strategies support the results from the statistical tests and suggest that investors might be able to obtain excess returns from both autocorrelation- and moving average-based strategies compared to a buy-and-hold strategy for 10 out of 14 markets.

This paper tests the random walk hypothesis and market efficiency for twelve emerging as well as for four developed securitized real estate markets from 1992 to 2009. Random walk properties of equity prices influence return dynamics, and market efficiency is often considered an essential criterion in the assessment of the functionality of markets and the asset pricing process, which is of significant relevance for emerging markets in particular. The analysis is based on autocorrelation tests as well as both single variance and multiple variance ratio tests. Furthermore, non-parametric runs tests are conducted. Empirical evidence shows that the efficient market hypothesis in its weak form is not rejected by any statistical test for seven of the twelve analyzed emerging securitized real estate markets. This result is surprising since all four developed securitized real estate stock markets analyzed in this study do not follow a random walk. The results are confirmed by the analysis of excess returns following from technical trading rules.

We study the implementation of brokerage regulations as allocation mechanisms in wholesale markets in pre-modern Central Western Europe. We assemble a data set of 1609 sets of brokerage rules from 70 cities. We analyze the incentives created by the rules that were implemented, compare cities that implemented brokerage to cities that did not, and analyze the choice of how brokers should be compensated and the effect this has on market outcomes. Empirically, we find that larger cities, cities with trade-geographic advantages, cities with merchant interests, and cities with universities were more likely to implement brokerage. We also find that brokers were more likely to be compensated with price-based fees in markets with greater heterogeneity in products and preferences, and with unit fees in markets for more homogeneous products – exactly as our theoretical analysis suggests is optimal.

This paper argues that the consequences of the ‘fragmentation’ of the European patent system are more dramatic than the mere prohibitive costs of maintaining a patent in force in many jurisdictions. First, detailed analysis of judicial systems in several European countries and four case studies provide evidence suggesting that heterogeneous national litigation costs, practices and outcome induce a high level of uncertainty. Second, a high degree of managerial complexity results from systemic incongruities due to easier ‘parallel imports’, possible ‘time paradoxes’ and the de facto paradox of having EU-level competition policy and granting authority ultimately facing national jurisdictional primacy on patent issues. These high degrees of uncertainty and complexity contribute to reduce the effectiveness of the European patent system and provide additional arguments in favour of the Community patent and a centralized litigation in Europe., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

We study the interaction between competitive markets that produce large but unequally distributed welfare gains and elections through which the poor majority can redistribute income away from the rich minority. In our simple laboratory democracy, subjects first earn their income by trading in a double auction market and thereafter vote on redistributive policies in two-candidate elections. In addition, in one of the treatments subjects can attempt to influence the candidates' policy choices by transferring money to them. We observe very high levels of redistribution - even when transfers to candidates are possible - with little effect on market efficiency. Overall, the experimental results are explained by our equilibrium predictions.

In the homogenous good case, the relationship between market struc- ture and efficiency was studied extensively. Assuming a standard quadratic utility with quantity competition, this paper carries on the analysis in a differentiated good context. It can be shown that there is a positive re- lationship between market heterogeneity and efficiency, too. In contrast to the homogenous good case, consumer surplus as well as producer surplus increases with the dispersion of marginal costs.

Regulatory and media concern has focused heavily on the potentially manipulative distortion of market prices associated with naked short selling. However, naked shorting can also have beneficial effects for liquidity and pricing efficiency. We empirically investigate the impact of naked short-selling on market quality, and find that naked shorting leads to significant reduction in positive pricing errors, the volatility of stock price returns, bid-ask spreads, and pricing error volatility. We study naked shorting surrounding the demise of financial institutions hardest hit by the financial crisis in 2008 and find no evidence that stock price declines were caused by naked shorting. We also find that naked short-selling intensifies after rather than before credit downgrade announcements during the 2008 financial crisis. In general, we find that naked short sellers respond to public news and intensify their activity after price declines rather than triggering these price declines. We study the impact of the SEC ban on naked short selling of financial securities during July and August 2008, and find that the ban did not slow the price decline of those securities and had a negative impact on liquidity and pricing efficiency. Finally, after examining the speeds of mean reversion of pricing errors and order imbalances, we infer that Regulation SHO was successful in curbing the impact of manipulative naked short selling, and this reduction in the impact of manipulative naked shorting has continued through the 2008 financial crisis. Overall, our empirical results are in sharp contrast with the extremely negative preconceptions that appear to exist among media commentators and market regulators in relation to naked shortselling.

We analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that the accrual anomaly is also present in Germany. However, this anomaly seems to be driven mainly by firms with managerial ownership. In a second step, we test how different corporate governance mechanisms affect the anomaly. For the German experiment on voluntary adoption of IFRS our results confirm previous findings that the anomaly is less likely to be present under a conservative accounting system. While creditor monitoring is able to reduce the accrual anomaly, shareholder monitoring is not. Apart from offering evidence related to the cross-sectional difference in the degree of accrual mispricing, our results give also some insights related to the cross-country variation of this phenomenon.

The subject of our study is the trading infrastructure of government securities markets, which has undergone fundamental changes driven by the appearance of non-exchange electronic platforms and the rapid rise of their share in the trading volume of developed markets. The summary of the relevant literature indicates that improved trading transparency clearly increases the efficiency of the market (its role in price discovery). Its effect on market liquidity, however, is less clear-cut. While the loss of anonymity most likely decreases liquidity, transparency on the quantity and price of concluded transactions enhances liquidity. The emergence of electronic trading on developed government securities markets has not changed the fundamental structure of trading, which continues to take place in two segments: between dealers (B2B) and between dealers and clients (B2C). There is, however, no interbank trading platform on the Hungarian government securities market, although data vendors and other platforms serving clients have sprung up. Nonetheless, more than 90 per cent of trading takes place through traditional OTC channels. Consequently, actors which are interested in market processes and prices, but do not actively trade on the Hungarian market have trouble accessing high-standard, quasi-real-time price information. The MiFID initiative - launched at the European level - may contribute to improving the Hungarian market's transparency by engendering the regulation of the bond market similar to that of the equity market. Introduction of the euro in Hungary will fundamentally change the country's market structure. The sovereign debt manager's leeway will increase, and the key direct actors on the government securities market are expected to be the major international actors, which are interested in the centralisation of government securities trading by currencies. Based on the broad electronisation of the euro-denominated government securities market, it is likely that electronic platforms will also gain ground on the Hungarian market, following the introduction of the single currency at the latest.

This paper provides a conceptual framework on fair collective choice rules that synthesizes the studies of Goldman and Sussangkarn (1978) and Suzumura (1981) on the one hand and Tadenuma (2002, 2005) on the other. We show that both frameworks have the following binary relation as a common origin: an allocation x is at least as good as an allocation z if (i) x Pareto dominates z, or (ii) x equity-dominates z. Its transitive-closure and the strict relation derive different ranking criteria, but remarkably, with respect to the maximal elements, they have a set-inclusive relationship.

Insider trading studies related to the German market have emphasized that outside investors may earn excess returns by mimicking the transactions of corporate directors. Such a result, provided that it holds, would constitute a serious violation of the efficient market hypothesis. The results presented in this paper, though, show that this anomaly is mainly caused by a subset of stocks with high arbitrage risk as measured by their idiosyncratic volatility. This restrains arbitrageurs from engaging in otherwise profitable and price-correcting trades. As arbitrage risk is positively related to a stock's bid/ask-spread, we show that the information conveyed by insider trades cannot be exploited in terms of generating abnormal returns once these transaction costs are taken into account. We conclude that the market's under-reaction to reported insider trades can mainly be explained by the cost associated with risky arbitrage. Our findings provide evidence that the German stock market is efficient with respect to insider trades in the sense that prices reflect publicly available information to the point where the marginal benefit of acting on information exceeds marginal costs.

Motivated by the prominent role of electronic limit order book (LOB) markets in today’s stock market environment, this paper provides the basis for understanding, reconstructing and adopting Hollifield, Miller, Sandas, and Slive’s (2006) (henceforth HMSS) methodology for estimating the gains from trade to the Xetra LOB market at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FSE) in order to evaluate its performance in this respect. Therefore this paper looks deeply into HMSS’s base model and provides a structured recipe for the planned implementation with Xetra LOB data. The contribution of this paper lies in the modification of HMSS’s methodology with respect to the particularities of the Xetra trading system that are not yet considered in HMSS’s base model. The necessary modifications, as expressed in terms of empirical caveats, are substantial to derive unbiased market efficiency measures for Xetra in the end.

We show that average excess returns during the last two years of the presidential cycle are significantly higher than during the first two years: 9.8 percent over the period 1948 – 2008. This pattern in returns cannot be explained by business-cycle variables capturing time-varying risk premia, differences in risk levels, or by consumer and investor sentiment. In this paper, we formally test the presidential election cycle (PEC) hypothesis as the alternative explanation found in the literature for explaining the presidential cycle anomaly. PEC states that incumbent parties and presidents have an incentive to manipulate the economy (via budget expansions and taxes) to remain in power. We formulate eight empirically testable propositions relating to the fiscal, monetary, tax, unexpected inflation and political implications of the PEC hypothesis. We do not find statistically significant evidence confirming the PEC hypothesis as a plausible explanation for the presidential cycle effect. The existence of the presidential cycle effect in U.S. financial markets thus remains a puzzle that cannot be easily explained by politicians employing their economic influence to remain in power. JEL Classification: E32; G14; P16 Keywords: Political Economy, Market Efficiency, Anomalies, Calendar Effects

This paper examines the questions of whether and how feudal rulers were able to credibly commit to preserving monetary stability, and of which consequences their decisions had for the efficiency of financial markets. The study reveals that princes were usually only able to commit to issuing a stable coinage in gold, but not in silver. As for silver currencies, the hypothesis is that transferring the right of coinage to an autonomous city was the functional equivalent to establishing an independent central bank. An analysis of market performance indicates that financial markets between cities that were autonomous with regard to their monetary policies were significantly better integrated and more efficient than markets between cities whose currencies were supplied by a feudal ruler.

We discuss the prospects for Chinese money market development and transition to market-based monetary policy operations based on a comparative historical analysis of the present Chinese situation and the development in 11 European countries from 1979 up to the launch of European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Central banks in the latter group typically had an incentive to encourage the formation of efficient benchmark segments in the domestic money markets for the conduct of open market operations as traditional quantity-oriented instruments became increasingly ineffective. China is displaying many of the same symptoms as the European countries in the 1970s and 1980s, including poor monetary transmission due to excess liquidity and conflicts of interest due to unclear priority among multiple policy goals. We conclude that the current Chinese multiple-target monetary policy is counter-productive to efforts to develop an efficient money market that can serve as arena for an effective market-based monetary policy.

Liberalisation, climate policy and promotion of renewable energy are challenges to players of the electricity sector in many countries. Policy makers have to consider issues like market power, bounded rationality of players and the appearance of fluctuating energy sources in order to provide adequate legislation. Furthermore the interactions between markets and environmental policy instruments become an issue of increasing importance. A promising approach for the scientific analysis of these developments is the field of agent-based simulation. The goal of this article is to provide an overview of the current work applying this methodology to the analysis of electricity markets.

The effects of a Tobin tax on foreign exchange markets have long been disputed. We present an experiment with currency trading on two markets, where either none, one, or both markets are taxed. Our results confirm the hitherto undisputed issues: a tax reduces trading volume, shifts market share to untaxed markets, and leads to negligible tax revenues if tax havens exist. Concerning the controversial issues we find that (i) volatility effects depend on the existence of tax havens and on market size, (ii) market efficiency remains unaffected by the tax, (iii) short-term speculation is reduced, and (iv) the tax has persistent effects even after its abolishment.

A model of profits switches between four regimes with fixed probabilities; the rationally expected profits stream implies the stock market value. This efficient market model is not rejected by UK post-war time-series behaviour of either profits or the FTSE index.

This paper analyses a situation where market designers create new trading platforms and traders learn to select among them. We ask whether 'Walrasian' platforms, leading to market-clearing trading outcomes, will dominate the market in the long run. If several market designers are competing, we find that traders will learn to select non-market clearing platforms with prices systematically above the market-clearing level, provided at least one such platform is introduced by a market designer. This in turn leads all market designers to introduce such non-market clearing platforms. Hence platform competition induces non-competitive market outcomes.

This paper studies the empirical effects of risk classification in the mandatory thirdparty motor insurance of Germany following the European Union’s directive to deregulate insurance tariffs of 1994. We find evidence that inefficient risk categories had been selected while potentially efficient information was dismissed. Risk classification did generally not improve the efficiency of contracting or the composition of insureds in this market. These findings are partly explained by the continuing existence of institutional restraints in this market such as compulsory fixed coverage and unitary owner insurance. Dieses Papier untersucht die empirischen Effekte der Deregulierung der Kfz-Versicherungstarife durch die 3. Sachversicherungsrichtlinie der EU aus dem Jahr 1994 auf die Risikostruktur des deutschen Kfz-Versicherungsmarktes und die Betriebsergebnisse der Kfz-Versicherungsanbieter. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Liberalisierung zu keiner messbaren Verbesserung der Zusammensetzung und der Effizienz des Marktes geführt hat. Es wurden in der Folge sowohl ineffiziente Risikomerkmale eingeführt als auch effiziente Merkmale ausgelassen. Diese Ergebnisse können mit dem System der Pflichtversicherung und institutionellen Barrieren durch die Einheit von Halter- und Fahrerhaftung erklärt werden.

This paper explores liquidity spillovers in market-capitalization-based portfolios of NYSE stocks. Return, volatility, and liquidity dynamics across the small- and large-cap sectors are modeled by way of a vector autoregression model, using data that spans more than 3,000 trading days. We find that volatility and liquidity innovations in one sector are informative in predicting liquidity shifts in the other. Impulse responses indicate the existence of persistent liquidity, return, and volatility spillovers across the small- and large-cap sectors. Lead and lag patterns across small- and large-cap stocks are stronger when spreads in the large-cap sector are wider. Consistent with the notion that private informational trading in large-cap stocks is transmitted to other stocks with a lag, order flows in the large-cap-stock decile predict both transaction-price-based and mid-quote returns of small-cap deciles when large-cap spreads are high.

The major strand of finance literature understands market efficiency through the market’s ability to process information into prices. Another strand of literature refers to the economists’ usual sense of the word, i.e. that markets ensure that resources are allocated to their most profitable expected use, and provide services at the lowest cost. This paper, deploying the second definition, suggests a concept of static efficiency, and claims this can also be seen as a measure of market quality. The paper develops a measure of qualitative static efficiency for bond markets built on four indicators: transparency, number of maturities and issuers, spread, and liquidity. Indicators of market quality should be easily accessible, and permit international and inter-temporal comparison. Using Nordic markets as case studies, we show that these markets became more efficient during the 1990’s, but that transparency of efficiency remains a problem. A number of measurement problems with the static efficiency indicators are discussed, as well as interdependence issues. The paper concludes with comments on future applications of the static efficiency measure.

This paper analyses the detfirminants of household firms?participation in land rental markets in transition countries and what affects their access to land through rental markets. We derive several theoretical hypotheses on the impact of households?management ability, land endowment, land quality and prices, transaction costs in the land market, rural credit and labour market constraints. We test the hypotheses combining a representative dataset on land rental activities of more than 1,400 Hungarian household firms with data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. We find that land rental markets reallocate land to households with better firm management capacities and less endowed with land. Households combine buying and renting of land to extend their firms. The continued domination of large firm organizations in some regions restricts household's access to land. Rural credit and labour market imperfections have an important impact on land rental markets.

How markets perform during famines has long been a contentious issue. Recent research tends to associate famine with market segmentation and hoarding. The evidence of this paper, based on an analysis of the spatial and temporal patterns of price movements during four famines in preindustrial Europe, is that markets functioned ‘normally’ in times of crisis. 2014-09-18 JG: Record reinstated from backup after damaged text_value

Insurance markets are characterized by profound market imperfections. Insurance intermediaries reduce transaction costs and information asymmetries. From transaction cost economics, agency theory, and law and economics literature the hypothesis is derived that insurance brokers may provide more high-quality information and advisory services which are better suited for the needs of the consumers than insurance agents. Empirical tests for German insurance intermediaries confirm this thesis. But there are also findings that structural factors like firm size, employment structure and degree of specialization may outweigh the incentives set by different legal settings.

Using daily data for the Swedish stock market for almost the last two decades no distinct and firm deterministic seasonal pattern for the conditional volatility for the Swedish stock market has been found. The daily turnover in the Swedish stock market has an impact on and eliminates to some extent seasonal patterns in conditional volatility. The daily turnover is a proxy variable used to test the mixture distribution model. According to this model the conditional variance of returns will display a GARCH-pattern of behaviour if the number of trades on the stock market during a day are serially correlated. We can also conclude that a feedback from the US stock market to the conditional volatility in the Swedish market exists, and trading days particularly after holidays has a positive impact on the conditional volatility. The test of the model’s mean equation indicates that the Swedish stock market seems to become more and more information efficient, at least in its weak form, if the 1990’s are compared with the 1980’s.

Shares trading in the Bolsa mexicana de Valores do not seem to react to company news. Using a sample of Mexican corporate news announcements from the period July 1994 through June 1996, this paper finds that there is nothing unusual about returns, volatility of returns, volume of trade or bid-ask spreads in the event window. This suggests one of five possibilities: our sample size is small; or markets are inefficient; or markets are efficient but the corporate news announcements are not value-relevant; or markets are efficient and corporate news announcements are value-relevant, but they have been fully anticipated; or markets are efficient and corporate news announcements are value-relevant, but unrestricted insider trading has caused prices to fully incorporate the information. The evidence supports the last hypothesis. The paper thus points towards a methodology for ranking emerging stock markets in terms of their market integrity, an approach that can be used with the limited data available in such markets.

This paper provides a detailed empirical analysis of the call auction procedure on the German stock exchanges. The auction is conducted by the Makler whose position resembles that of a NYSE specialist. We use a dataset which contains information about all individual orders for a sample of stocks traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FSE). This sample allows us to calculate the cost of transacting in a call market and compare them to the costs of transacting in a continuous market. We find that transaction costs for small transactions in the call market are lower than the quoted spread in the order book of the continuous market whereas transaction costs for large transactions are higher than the spread in the continuous market. We further address the question whether active participation of the Makler is advantageous. On the one hand he may accomodate order imbalances, increase the liquidity of the market and stabilize prices. On the other hand, the discretion in price setting gives him an incentive to manipulate prices. This may increase return volatility. Our dataset identifies the trades the Maklers make for their own accounts. We eliminate these trades and determine the price that would have obtained without their participation. Comparing this hypothetical price series to the actual transaction prices, we find that Makler participation tends to reduce return volatility. A further analysis shows that the actual prices are much closer to the surrounding prices of the continuous trading session than the hypothetical prices that would have obtained without Makler participation. These results indicate that the Maklers provide a valuable service to the market. We further calculate the profits associated with the positions taken by the Maklers and find that, on average, they do not earn profits on the positions they take. Their compensation is thus restricted to the commissions they receive.

We report results of a series of nine market experiments with asymmetric information and a fundamental value process that is more "realistic" than those in previous experiments. Both a call market institution and a continuous double auction mechanism are employed. We find considerable pricing inefficiencies that are only partially exploited by insiders. The magnitude of insider gains is analyzed separately for each experiment. We find support for the hypothesis that the continuous double auction leads to more efficient outcomes. Finally, we present evidence of an endowment effect: the initial portfolio structure influences the final asset holdings of experimental subjects.