G11 Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
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- Center for Financial Studies (CFS) (15) (remove)
In this study, we unpack the ESG ratings of four prominent agencies in Europe and find that (i) each single E, S, G pillar explains the overall ESG score differently,(ii) there is a low co-movement between the three E, S, G pillars and (iii) there are specific ESG Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are driving these ratings more than others. We argue that such discrepancies might mislead firms about their actual ESG status, potentially leading to cherry-picking areas for improvement, thus raising questions about the accuracy and effectiveness of ESG evaluations in both explaining sustainability and driving capital toward sustainable companies.
We propose a model with mean-variance foreign investors who exhibit a convex disutility associated to brown bond holdings. The model predicts that bond green premia should be smaller in economies with a closer financial account and highly volatile exchange rates. This happens because foreign intermediaries invest relatively less in such economies, and this lowers the marginal disutility of investing in polluting activities. We find strong empirical evidence in favor of this hypothesis using a global bond market dataset. Exchange rate volatility and financial account openness are thus able to explain the higher financing costs of green projects in emerging markets relative to advanced economies, especially when green bonds are denominated in local currency: a disadvantage that we can call the "green sin" of emerging economies.
Art-related non-fungible tokens (NFTs) took the digital art space by storm in 2021, generating massive amounts of volume and attracting a large number of users to a previously obscure part of blockchain technology. Still, very little is known about the attributes that influence the price of these digital assets. This paper attempts to evaluate the level of speculation associated with art NFTs, comprehend the characteristics that confer value on them and design a profitable trading strategy based on our findings. We analyze 860,067 art NFTs that have been deployed on the Ethereum blockchain and have been involved in 317,950 sales using machine learning methods to forecast the probability of sale, the trade frequency and the average price. We find that NFTs are highly speculative assets and that their price and recurrence of sale are heavily determined by the floor and the last sale prices, independent of any fundamental value.
This paper investigates stock market reaction to greenwashing by analyzing a new channel whereby companies change their names to green-related ones (i.e., names that evoke green and sustainable sentiments) to persuade the public that their activities are green. The findings reveal a striking positive stock price reaction to the announcement of corporate name changes to green-related names only for companies not involved in green activities at the time of the announcement. However, over an extended period of time, companies unrelated to green activities experience substantial negative abnormal returns if they fail to align their operational focus with the new name after the change.
Fund companies regularly send shareholder letters to their investors. We use textual analysis to investigate whether these letters’ writing style influences fund flows and whether it predicts performance and investment styles. Fund investors react to the tone and content of shareholder letters: A less negative tone leads to higher net flows. Thus, fund companies can use shareholder letters as a tactical instrument to influence flows. However, at the same time, a dishonest communication that is not consistent with the fund’s actual performance decreases flows. A positive writing style predicts higher idiosyncratic risk as well as more style bets, while there is no consistent predictive power for future performance.
Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models -- their subjective understanding -- of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general population, US retail investors, US financial professionals, and academic experts. Respondents make return forecasts in scenarios describing stale news about the future earnings streams of companies, and we collect rich data on respondents' reasoning. We document three main results. First, inference from stale news is rare among academic experts but common among households and financial professionals, who believe that stale good news lead to persistently higher expected returns in the future. Second, while experts refer to the notion of market efficiency to explain their forecasts, households and financial professionals reveal a neglect of equilibrium forces. They naively equate higher future earnings with higher future returns, neglecting the offsetting effect of endogenous price adjustments. Third, a series of experimental interventions demonstrate that these naive forecasts do not result from inattention to trading or price responses but reflect a gap in respondents' mental models -- a fundamental unfamiliarity with the concept of equilibrium.
Looking beyond ESG preferences: The role of sustainable finance literacy in sustainable investing
(2024)
We assess how sustainable finance literacy affects people’s sustainable investment behavior, using a pre-registered experiment. We find that an increase in sustainable finance literacy leads to a 4 to 5% increase in the probability of investing sustainably. This effect is moderated by sustainability preferences. In the absence of moderate sustainability preferences, any additional increase in sustainable finance literacy is at minimum irrelevant, and we find some evidence that it might even reduce sustainable investments. Our findings underscore the role of knowledge in shaping sustainable investment decisions, highlighting the importance of factors beyond sustainability preferences.
Using German and US brokerage data we find that investors are more likely to sell speculative stocks trading at a gain. Investors’ gain realizations are monotonically increasing in a stock’s speculativeness. This translates into a high disposition effect for speculative and a much lower disposition effect for non-speculative stocks. Our findings hold across asset classes (stocks, passive, and active funds) and explain cross-sectional differences in investor selling behavior which previous literature attributed primarily to investor demographics. Our results are robust to rank or attention effects and can be linked to realization utility and rolling mental account.
This paper investigates retirees’ optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits through delayed claiming. We determine that including deferred income annuities in DC accounts is welfare enhancing for all sex/education groups examined. We also show that providing access to well-designed variable deferred annuities with some equity exposure further enhances retiree wellbeing, compared to having access only to fixed annuities. Nevertheless, for the least educated, delaying claiming Social Security is preferred, whereas the most educated benefit more from using accumulated DC plan assets to purchase deferred annuities.
Previous studies document a relationship between gambling activity at the aggregate level and investments in securities with lottery-like features. We combine data on individual gambling consumption with portfolio holdings and trading records to examine whether gambling and trading act as substitutes or complements. We find that gamblers are more likely than the average investor to hold lottery stocks, but significantly less likely than active traders who do not gamble. Our results suggest that gambling behavior across domains is less relevant compared to other portfolio characteristics that predict investing in high-risk and high-skew securities, and that gambling on and off the stock market act as substitutes to satisfy the same need, e.g., sensation seeking.