Does Momentum Trading Generate Extra Downside Risk?

Momentum strategies tend to provide low returns during market crashes, and they crash themselves when the market rebounds after significant crashes. This is reflected by positive downside market betas and negative upside market betas of zero-cost momentum portfolios. Such asymmetry in upside and downside risks is unfavorable for investors and requires a risk premium. It arises mechanically because of momentum portfolio rebalancing based on trailing asset performance. The asymmetry in upside and downside risks is a robust unifying feature of momentum portfolios in various geographical and asset markets. The momentum premium can be rationalized within a standard asset-pricing framework, where upside and downside risks are priced differently.

Bank Liquidity Hoarding and the Financial Crisis: An Empirical Evaluation

I test and find supporting evidence for the precautionary motive hypothesis of liquidity hoarding for U.S. commercial banks during the global financial crisis. I find that banks held more liquid assets in anticipation of future losses from securities write-downs. Exposure to securities losses in their investment portfolios and expected loan losses (measured by loan loss reserves) represent key measures of banks’ on-balance sheet risks, in addition to off-balance sheet liquidity risk stemming from unused loan commitments. Furthermore, unrealized securities losses and loan loss reserves seem to better capture the risks stemming from banks’ asset management and provide supporting evidence for the precautionary nature of liquidity hoarding. Moreover, I find that more than one-fourth of the reduction in bank lending during the crisis is due to the precautionary motive.

Anomalies in Commodity Futures Markets

In recent years, commodity markets have become increasingly popular among financial investors. While previous studies document a factor structure, not much is known about how prominent anomalies are priced in commodity futures markets. We examine a large set of such anomaly variables. We identify sizable premia for jump risk, momentum, skewness, and volatility-of-volatility. Other prominent variables, such as downside beta, idiosyncratic volatility, and MAX, are not priced in commodity futures markets. Commodity investors should rebalance their portfolios regularly. Returns for annual holding periods are substantially weaker than for monthly rebalancing.

Time-Invariance Coefficients Tests with the Adaptive Multi-Factor Model

This paper tests a multi-factor asset pricing model that does not assume that the return’s beta coefficients are constants. This is done by estimating the generalized arbitrage pricing theory (GAPT) using price differences. An implication of the GAPT is that when using price differences instead of returns, the beta coefficients are constant. We employ the adaptive multi-factor (AMF) model to test the GAPT utilizing a Groupwise Interpretable Basis Selection (GIBS) algorithm to identify the relevant factors from among all traded exchange-traded funds. We compare the performance of the AMF model with the Fama–French 5-factor (FF5) model. For nearly all time periods less than six years, the beta coefficients are time-invariant for the AMF model, but not for the FF5 model. This implies that the AMF model with a rolling window (such as five years) is more consistent with realized asset returns than is the FF5 model.

Communications Between Borrowers and Servicers: Evidence from COVID-19 Mortgage Forbearance Program

In this paper, I utilize proprietary servicer call transcripts between a single servicer and the corresponding borrowers, whose loans they service, to shed light on borrower responses to the mortgage forbearance program contained in the CARES Act. My analysis reveals that borrowers (especially with non-performing loans) did not actively seek out mortgage forbearance (conditional on communication) in response to this policy, which was intended to prevent a pandemic-induced foreclosure. This is an outcome of the servicer’s differential treatment between government and private loans, as the CARES Act was designed for government loans only and left scope for servicer discretion for private loans. These results bring into question the effectiveness of ad hoc laws and the implementation thereof during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Risk and Ambiguity in Turbulent Times

This paper focuses on the 2008–2020 period during which two major crises, affecting the economy and the financial markets, occurred. Between 2008 and 2020, there were less extreme tail events, including the lingering Eurozone and Greece crises. In particular, after extremely high stock market volatility and volatility of volatility (VoV) during 2008, the long-run average volatility declined to about 20% and the VoV to around 100%. This paper analyzes this period through the lens of risk and ambiguity (uncertainty). It aims to address the question: what are the financial markets that trade risk — the volatility derivatives markets — telling us? To this end, this paper uses several measures of uncertainty. It reviews the history of volatility and uncertainty measures and discusses their informativeness. It then discusses the information derived from volatility derivatives.

Modeling Non-Maturing Demand Deposits: A Proposed Methodology to Determining the Idiosyncratic Confidence Level Used for Separating Stable Deposit Volumes From Volatile Deposit Volumes

This paper aims to develop a methodology for the estimation of the idiosyncratic confidence level inherent within the process of determining the threshold of separation between volatile and stable deposit volumes. The idiosyncratic confidence level must be reflective of the institution’s specific risk preferences and liquidity risk management policies as anchored into the Principle 9 of the European Banking Authority and Basel Committee for Banking Supervision recommendations. We illustrate the proposed methodology by including liquidity constraints from the Basel III regulatory recommendations introduced in 2013. Furthermore, we point to other ancillary applications of such procedures in the financial risk management practice.

Credit Transition and Structural Shocks

Credit risk involves not only the complexity of screening but also monitoring and estimating rating transition. The adoption of inadequate transition matrices causes a misevaluation of credit risk, a consequent misallocation of capital, with the prospect that the lending process will be affected by increasing transaction costs and limited rationality, especially after a shock. Comparing the mover–stayer and the Markov chain approaches to estimate the SME rating transition matrix, we find that the risk of a structural credit shock imposes flexible estimates not constrained by the long-run trajectory of borrowers. Improved migration estimation mitigates adverse selection in banks’ lending behavior. This conclusion is particularly true during economic downturns with the consequence of reducing the cyclicality and empowering the resilience of banks.

Designing Bankers’ Pay: Using Contingent Capital to Reduce Risk-Shifting Incentives

Including contingent convertible bonds (coco) in the capital structure of a bank affects the sensitivity to risk of its equity-based compensation. Such risk-shifting incentives can be reduced if the coco bonds are well-designed. Similarly, we show that compensating executives with well-designed coco bonds can also reduce risk-shifting incentives. In practice, however, most coco bonds have characteristics that result in both stock and coco compensation having large sensitivities to changes in asset risk — equity-based compensation encourages executives to increase risk, coco compensation to reduce risk. We show that a pay package combining both stock and coco can practically eliminate risk-shifting incentives and that it can be implemented with a bank’s preexisting coco bonds.