CFS working paper series
https://gfk-cfs.de/working-papers/
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599
We investigate the characteristics of infrastructure as an asset class from an investment perspective of a limited partner. While non U.S. institutional investors gain exposure to infrastructure assets through a mix of direct investments and private fund vehicles, U.S. investors predominantly invest in infrastructure through private funds. We find that the stream of cash flows delivered by private infrastructure funds to institutional investors is very similar to that delivered by other types of private equity, as reflected by the frequency and amounts of net cash flows. U.S. public pension funds perform worse than other institutional investors in their infrastructure fund investments, although they are exposed to underlying deals with very similar project stage, concession terms, ownership structure, industry, and geographical location. By selecting funds that invest in projects with poor financial performance, U.S. public pension funds have created an implicit subsidy to infrastructure as an asset class, which we estimate within the range of $730 million to $3.16 billion per year depending on the benchmark.
598
Direct financing of consumer credit by individual investors or non-bank institutions through an implementation of marketplace lending is a relatively new phenomenon in financial markets. The emergence of online platforms has made this type of financial intermediation widely available. This paper analyzes the performance of marketplace lending using proprietary cash flow data for each individual loan from the largest platform, Lending Club. While individual loan characteristics would be important for amateur investors holding a few loans, sophisticated lenders, including institutional investors, usually form broad portfolios to benefit from diversification. We find high risk-adjusted performance of approximately 40 basis points per month for these basic loan portfolios. This abnormal performance indicates that Lending Club, and similar marketplace lenders, are likely to attract capital to finance a growing share of the consumer credit market. In the absence of a competitive response from traditional credit providers, these loans lower costs to the ultimate borrowers and increase returns for the ultimate lenders.
597
We study the relevance of signaling and marketing as explanations for the discount control mechanisms that a closed-end fund may choose to adopt in its prospectus. These policies are designed to narrow the potential gap between share price and net asset value, measured by the fund’s discount. The two most common discount control mechanisms are explicit discretion to repurchase shares based on the magnitude of the fund discount and mandatory continuation votes that provide shareholders the opportunity to liquidate the fund. We find very limited evidence that a discount control mechanism serves as costly signal of information. Funds with mandatory voting are not more likely to delist than the rest of the CEFs in general or whenever the fund discount is large. Similarly, funds that explicitly discuss share repurchases as a potential response do not subsequently buy back shares more often when discounts do increase. Instead, the existence of these policies is more consistent with marketing explanations because the policies are associated with an increased probability of issuing more equity in subsequent periods.
596
This paper investigates how biases in macroeconomic forecasts are associated with economic surprises and market responses across asset classes around US data announcements. We find that the skewness of the distribution of economic forecasts is a strong predictor of economic surprises, suggesting that forecasters behave strategically (rational bias) and possess private information. Our results also show that consensus forecasts of US macroeconomic releases embed anchoring. Under these conditions, both economic surprises and the returns of assets that are sensitive to macroeconomic conditions are predictable. Our findings indicate that local equities and bond markets are more predictable than foreign markets, currencies and commodities. Economic surprises are found to link to asset returns very distinctively through the stages of the economic cycle, whereas they strongly depend on economic releases being inflation- or growth-related. Yet, when forecasters fail to correctly forecast the direction of economic surprises, regret becomes a relevant cognitive bias to explain asset price responses. We find that the behavioral and rational biases encountered in US economic forecasting also exists in Continental Europe, the United Kingdom and Japan, albeit, to a lesser extent.
595
In the secondary art market, artists play no active role. This allows us to isolate cultural influences on the demand for female artists’ work from supply-side factors. Using 1.5 million auction transactions in 45 countries, we document a 47.6% gender discount in auction prices for paintings. The discount is higher in countries with greater gender inequality. In experiments, participants are unable to guess the gender of an artist simply by looking at a painting and they vary in their preferences for paintings associated with female artists. Women's art appears to sell for less because it is made by women.
594
While record-making prices at art auctions receive headline news coverage, artists typically do not receive any direct proceeds from those sales. Early-stage creative work in any field is perennially difficult to value, but the valuation, reward, and incentivization for artistic labor are particularly fraught. A core challenge in studying the real return on artists’ work is the extreme difficulty accessing data from when an artwork was first sold. Galleries keep private records that are difficult to access and to match to public auction results. This paper, for the first time, uses archivally sourced primary market records, for the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Although this approach restricts the size of the data set, this innovative method shows much more accurate returns on art than typical regression and hedonic models. We find that if Johns and Rauschenberg had retained 10% equity in their work when it was first sold, the returns to them when the work was resold at auction would have outperformed the US S&P 500 by between 2 and 986 times. The implication of this work opens up vast policy recommendations with regard to secondary art market sales, entrepreneurial strategies using blockchain technology, and implications about how we compensate creative work.
593
Reliability and relevance of fair values : private equity investments and investee fundamentals
(2018)
We directly test the reliability and relevance of fair values reported by listed private equity firms (LPEs), where the unit of account for fair value measurement attribute (FVM) is an investment stake in an individual investee company. FVMs are observable for multiple investment stakes, fair values are economically important, and granular data on investee economic fundamentals that should underpin fair values are available in public disclosures. We find that LPE fund managers determine valuations based on accounting-based fundamentals—equity book value and net income—that are in line with those investors derive for listed companies. Additionally, our findings suggest that LPE fund managers apply a lower valuation weight to investee net income if direct market inputs are unobservable during investment value estimation. We interpret these findings as evidence that LPE fund managers do not appear mechanically to apply market valuation weights for publicly traded investees when determining valuations of non-listed. We also document that the judgments that LPE fund managers apply when determining investee valuations appear to be perceived as reliable by their investors.
592
With a notional amount outstanding of more than USD 500 trillion, the market for OTC derivatives is of vital importance for global financial stability. A growing proportion of these contracts are cleared via central counterparties (CCPs), which means that CCPs are gaining in importance as critical financial market infrastructures. At the same time, there is growing concern that a new "too big to fail" problem could arise, as the CCP industry is highly concentrated due to economies of scale. From a European perspective, it should be noted that the clearing of euro-denominated OTC derivatives mainly takes place in London, hence outside the EU in the foreseeable future. For some time there has been a controversial discussion as to whether this can remain the case post Brexit.
CCPs, which clear a significant proportion of euro OTC derivatives and are systemically relevant from an EU perspective, should be subject to direct supervision by EU authorities and should be established in the EU. This would represent an important building block for a future Capital Markets Union in Europe, as regulatory or supervisory arbitrage in favour of systemically important third- ountry CCPs could be prevented. In addition, if a systemically relevant CCP handling a considerable portion of the euro OTC derivatives business were to run into serious difficulties, this may impact ECB monetary policy. This applies both to demand for central bank money and to the transmission of monetary policy measures, which can be significantly impaired, particularly in the event that the repo market or payment systems are disrupted. It is therefore essential for the ECB to be closely involved in the supervision of CCPs. Against this background, the draft amendment of EMIR (European Market Infrastructure Regulation) presented on 13 June 2017 is a step in the right direction. In addition, there is an urgent need to introduce a recovery and resolution mechanism for CCPs in the EU to complement the existing single resolution mechanism (SRM) for banks in the eurozone. Only then can the diverse interdependencies between banks and CCPs be adequately taken into account in the recovery and resolution programmes required in a financial crisis.
591
We investigate whether and how the shift from discretionary forward-looking provisioning to the restrictive incurred loss approach under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the European Union (EU) affects the cross-country comparability and predictive ability of loan loss allowances. Given bank supervisors’ keen interest in comparable and adequate loan loss allowances, we also examine the role of supervisors in determining financial statement effects around IFRS adoption. We find that the application of the incurred loss approach has led to more comparable loan loss allowances. However, some differences persist in countries where supervisors were reluctant to enforce the incurred loss approach. Our results also suggest that the predictive ability of loan loss allowances improved following IFRS adoption. Finally, in supplemental analyses we document that increased comparability of loan loss allowances is associated with the cross-country convergence of the risk sensitivity of bank leverage indicating an improvement in the effectiveness of market discipline in the EU.
590
Does economic policy uncertainty affect household stockholding? To answer this question we create a novel measure of household exposure to economic policy uncertainty news by combining survey information on the hours a household spends in reading newspapers and the frequency of such news in the popular press during a household’s pre-interview period. After controlling for household fixed effects, month-year fixed effects and time-varying cognitive skills, we find that households with a higher exposure to economic policy uncertainty news are less likely to invest in stocks held directly or through mutual funds. This effect is independent from the market volatility index and household (first-moment) expectations about the stock market index.