Tingting Cheng , Shan Jiang , Albert Bo Zhao , Junyi Zhao
{"title":"Is machine learning a necessity? A regression-based approach for stock return prediction","authors":"Tingting Cheng , Shan Jiang , Albert Bo Zhao , Junyi Zhao","doi":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101598","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101598","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We propose a simple, linear-regression-based method for prediction of the time series of stock returns. The method achieves out-of-sample performances comparable to machine learning methods while having ignorable computational costs. The key component of the method is to integrate a straightforward cross-market factor screening into the iterated combination method proposed by Lin et al., (2018). Our empirical results on the U.S. stock market show that the method outperforms many state-of-the-art machine learning methods in certain periods. The method also exhibits greater utility gain and investment profits in most periods after considering transaction costs.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":15704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Finance","volume":"81 ","pages":"Article 101598"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143519723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Skilled active liquidity management: Evidence from shocks to fund flows","authors":"Aleksandra Rzeźnik","doi":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101579","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101579","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>I examine the active liquidity management of U.S. equity mutual funds facing unexpected, persistent investor withdrawals by exploiting two independent shocks: the 2003 mutual fund scandal and the 2016 introduction of Morningstar Sustainability Ratings. I document that fund managers increase portfolio liquidity by adjusting both equity and cash holdings when subject to sudden, moderate, and prolonged outflows. Among affected funds, those that more aggressively increase portfolio liquidity significantly outperform their less liquidity-focused peers, suggesting that skilled managers employ active liquidity management to minimize costs imposed by redemption obligations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":15704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Finance","volume":"81 ","pages":"Article 101579"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143386462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shun Fu , Emma Li , Li Liao , Zhengwei Wang , Hongyu Xiang
{"title":"Unveiling the villain: Credit supply and the debt trap","authors":"Shun Fu , Emma Li , Li Liao , Zhengwei Wang , Hongyu Xiang","doi":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101592","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101592","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Based on unique data containing the loan history and online consumption information of cash loan borrowers, we apply an exogenous credit supply shock to these borrowers and show that increased credit increases individuals' delinquency rates and reliance on cash loans. Higher credit supply increases the likelihood of a loan being overdue over 60 days by 5.7% and decreases platform exit by 33%. This effect on delinquency is significantly less prominent among individuals with greater financial literacy. Second, we demonstrate that credit expansion is positively associated with an increase in subsequent borrower consumption, particularly addictive consumption.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":15704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Finance","volume":"81 ","pages":"Article 101592"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143231742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Trond Døskeland, André Wattø Sjuve, Andreas Ørpetveit
{"title":"Do fees matter? Investor’s sensitivity to active management fees","authors":"Trond Døskeland, André Wattø Sjuve, Andreas Ørpetveit","doi":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101596","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101596","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Following the framework established by Berk and Green (2004), mutual fund inflows and fees should be uncorrelated at equilibrium. We empirically explore this relationship by investigating the temporal changes in fund fees and flows. Our fee metrics focus on active management services rather than diversification. We analyze the additional fee compared to passive alternatives and additional fee per unit of active management, along with the traditionally used total fee. Our analysis of global data reveals a negative time series correlation between both measures of active management fee and fund flows.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":15704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Finance","volume":"81 ","pages":"Article 101596"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143429701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Short-term institutional investors and the diffusion of supply chain information","authors":"Rui Duan , Yelena Larkin","doi":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101581","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101581","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>What informational advantage do short-term investors have? This paper demonstrates that short-term investors can benefit from the ability to process public, but slowly diffusing, supply chain information ahead of other market participants. In support of this argument, we find that short-term investors establish larger long and short positions in firms with high customer concentration. In addition, an increase in short-term institutional ownership is associated with higher stock returns in firms with high customer concentration, supporting the informational advantage hypothesis. Finally, the relationship between customer concentration and short-term institutional ownership strengthens in high information asymmetry environment. In contrast, we do not find preference towards high customer concentration firms among long-term institutions, who are less positioned to exploit short-lived informational benefits.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":15704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Finance","volume":"81 ","pages":"Article 101581"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143157558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jiawen Luo , Oguzhan Cepni , Riza Demirer , Rangan Gupta
{"title":"Forecasting multivariate volatilities with exogenous predictors: An application to industry diversification strategies","authors":"Jiawen Luo , Oguzhan Cepni , Riza Demirer , Rangan Gupta","doi":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101595","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101595","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We propose a procedure to forecast the realized covariance matrix for a given set of assets within a multivariate heterogeneous autoregressive (MHAR) framework. Utilizing high-frequency data for the U.S. aggregate and industry indexes and a large set of exogenous predictors that include financial, macroeconomic, sentiment, and climate-based factors, we evaluate the out-of-sample performance of industry portfolios constructed from forecasted realized covariance matrices across various univariate and multivariate forecasting models. Our findings show that LASSO-based multivariate HAR models employing predictors that capture climate uncertainty generally yield more consistent evidence regarding the accuracy of the realized covariance forecasts, providing further support for the growing evidence that climate related factors significantly drive return and volatility dynamics in financial markets. While international summits and global warming stand out as the dominant climate predictors for realized volatility forecasts, both climate and macroeconomic predictors prove equally important for longer term correlation forecasts. In these forecasts, the U.S. EPU index and natural disasters, along with U.S. climate policy uncertainty, play dominant predictive roles. Our results suggest that the MHAR framework, coupled with DRD decomposition that splits the covariance matrix into a diagonal matrix of realized variances and realized correlations, can be utilized in a high-frequency setting to implement diversification and smart beta strategies for various investment horizons.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":15704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Finance","volume":"81 ","pages":"Article 101595"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143157559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jie Cao , Jason C. Hsu , Linjia Song , Zhanbing Xiao , Xintong Zhan
{"title":"Smart beta, “smarter” flows","authors":"Jie Cao , Jason C. Hsu , Linjia Song , Zhanbing Xiao , Xintong Zhan","doi":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101580","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101580","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We document that when smart beta ETFs are more actively traded, mutual fund flow sensitivity to multi-factor alphas increases significantly. This evidence is consistent with a friction hypothesis that active smart beta ETF trading reduces the costs of investing in non-market risk factors (e.g., SMB and HML). Consequently, when this friction is diminished, investors reward mutual fund managers more for multi-factor alphas. We show that the results are driven by sophisticated investors, ruling out behavioral explanations. The results are concentrated among mutual funds with high exposures to non-market risk factors. We further find that the gap between CAPM alpha and multi-factor alphas in explaining flows reduces when smart beta ETFs are actively traded.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":15704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Finance","volume":"81 ","pages":"Article 101580"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143157557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fernanda Fuentes , Rodrigo Herrera , Adam Clements
{"title":"Tail risk dynamics of banks with score-driven extreme value models","authors":"Fernanda Fuentes , Rodrigo Herrera , Adam Clements","doi":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101593","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101593","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper proposes a new class of marked point process models to capture the clustering behavior in extreme financial events. The idea of multiple dynamic parameters embedded in the context of score driven models is utilized to estimate a dynamic extreme value approach, labeled as the Orthogonal Score-Driven Peaks Over Threshold model. A Monte-Carlo study is conducted to study different time-varying parameter specifications. The results show that this approach can capture a range of different dynamics for the parameters. In an empirical application, we study the dynamics of the tail distribution over time, and in particular on VaR and ES forecasts, for the constituents of the S&P Banks Index. Finally, we study the behavior of extremely adverse returns in the financial system by means of a decomposition of the tail-<span><math><mi>β</mi></math></span> risk measure, giving a deeper understanding of both the dynamics of the risk of an individual bank, and the systemic linkages associated with the stability of the global financial system.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":15704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Finance","volume":"81 ","pages":"Article 101593"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143372713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social connectedness and cross-border mergers and acquisitions","authors":"Zhonghao Jiang , Yukun Shi , Lu Xing","doi":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101582","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jempfin.2025.101582","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We investigate the role of social connectedness in cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) using the Facebook social connectedness index. We show that stronger social connectedness between countries leads to higher announcement returns for acquirers in cross-border M&As. This effect is attributed to improved information dissemination, which reduces target premiums, increases deal completion likelihood, and supports acquirers to achieve long-term success. Furthermore, social connectedness increases the frequency and dollar value of cross-border M&As between countries. This relation is weaker for countries in the same customs union, but stronger in the presence of greater political disagreement or significant time zone differences. Extending our analysis to domestic M&As in the U.S., we find that social connectedness between the headquarters’ cities of acquirers and targets improves acquirers’ announcement returns.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":15704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Empirical Finance","volume":"81 ","pages":"Article 101582"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143100462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}