Two Essays in Banking and Finance

Download or read book Two Essays in Banking and Finance written by Yuna Heo and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation includes two essays. The first essay investigates whether money illusion misleads investors in the stock market. To the extent that anomalies reflect mispricing, I examine whether money illusion plays a role in the anomaly-based strategies. I find that, following high inflation, anomalies are stronger and the returns on the short-leg portfolios are lower. These findings indicate investors are overly optimistic on the past performance of stocks and overestimate the upside potential of stock returns following high inflation periods. I extend the effect of money illusion by examining sentiment and other commonly used measure for predicting stock returns. I find that money illusion-driven mispricing remains largely unchanged after controlling for many additional variables. These results suggest that money illusion provides a complementary power for cross-sectional stock returns beyond commonly used variables. In summary, this essay contributes to the literatures on money illusion and mispricing by providing evidence that money illusion can lead to mispricing in the stock market. The second essay identifies a new risk factor for bank stock returns. First, I document that standard factor models do not explain bank stock returns well. I investigate the linkage between Loan Loss Provision (LLP) and bank stock returns. I find that low-LLP bank stocks have significantly higher risk-adjusted returns than medium- and high-LLP bank stocks. These findings indicates that low-LLP banks are more likely distressed when economic conditions are bad, as a result, investors require higher returns on low-LLP bank stocks. Most importantly, the new factor model including the LLP return factor adds a new dimension of explanatory power for bank stock returns, reducing the magnitude of alphas mostly to insignificance. Combined with its economic intuition, this essay suggests that loan loss provisions play an important role in evaluating bank stock returns.