PORTFOLIO DIVERSIFICATION USING FARMLAND INVESTMENTS

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the risk-return trade-off in the Indian equity market at both the aggregate equity market level and in the cross-sections of stock return using alternative risk measures.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses weekly and monthly data of 3,085 Bombay Stock Exchange-listed stocks spanning over 20 years from January 2000 to December 2019. The study evaluates the risk-return trade-off at the aggregate equity market level using the value-weighted and the equal-weighted broader portfolios. Eight different risk proxies belonging to the conventional, downside and extreme risk categories are considered to analyse the cross-sectional risk-return relationship.FindingsThe results show a positive equity premium on the value-weighted portfolio; however, the equal-weighted portfolio of these stocks shows an average return lower than the return on the 91-day Treasury Bills. The inverted size premium mainly causes this anomaly in the Indian equity market as the small stocks have lower returns than big stocks. The study presents a strong negative risk-return relationship across different risk proxies. However, under the subsample of more liquid stocks, the low-risk anomaly regarding other risk proxies becomes moderate except the beta-anomaly. This anomalous relationship seems to be caused by small and less liquid stocks having low institutional ownership and higher short-selling constraints.Practical implicationsThe findings have important implications for investors, managers and practitioners. Investors can incorporate the effects of different highlighted anomalies in their investment strategies to fetch higher returns. Managers can also use these findings in their capital budgeting decisions, resource allocations and other diverse range of direct and indirect decisions, particularly in emerging markets such as India. The findings provide insights to practitioners while valuing the firms.Originality/valueThe study is among the earlier attempts to examine the risk-return trade-off in an emerging equity market at both the aggregate equity market level and in the cross-sections of stock returns using alternative measures of risk and expected returns.

Short-term momentum (almost) everywhere

In this paper, we take a critical look at the relationship between the value of capital stock in the Indian corporate sector and the valuation of claims to this capital stock in capital markets. We address the question of whether Indian equity valuations over the period 1991-2008 are consistent with three key market fundamentals: corporate capital stock, after tax corporate cash flows and net corporate debt. Our analysis extends the neo-classical growth model to include intangible capital and key features of the tax code and uses national account statistics to estimate the equilibrium value of corporate equity relative to GDP. Our framework can provide policy makers with a benchmark to identify deviations in equity markets relative to those implied by economic fundamentals. In addition, it facilitates a quantitative assessment of policy changes such as, for example, the effect of changes in dividend taxation on stock prices. We caution the reader that although our framework is well suited to examining secular movements in the value of equity relative to GDP, it is not suitable to address high frequency price movements in the stock market. In fact, we know of no framework that can satisfactorily account for these movements in terms of the underlying fundamentals. High frequency volatility remains a puzzle. Based on our analysis, we conclude that in a large measure, Indian equity markets were fairly priced over the 1991-2008 period.

Understanding the effect of domestic macroeconomic forces on equity market is essential since macroeconomic forces have a systematic effect on the equity market returns. The present study uses monthly observations from India for the period from January 2012 to December 2019 to investigate the long-run and short-run relationship between the domestic macroeconomic forces and equity market. The study employed the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach and pair-wise granger causality test to attain the objective. The long-run empirical results indicated that the Indian equity market and the domestic macroeconomic forces are cointegrated. The long-run coefficients of foreign exchange rate and money supply are found to be significant. The short-run coefficients suggest that money supply, inflation and foreign exchange rate significantly influence the Indian equity market. The study also observed the presence of feedback mechanism between foreign exchange rate and Indian equity market. The study provides the policy and managerial implications.

In this paper, we apply the dynamic Gordon growth model to Western Germany and decompose the rent-price ratio into the expected present values of rental growth rates, real interest rates, and a land premium, i.e., the excess return on investment. This analysis reveals that the recent price surge on agricultural land markets was not unprecedented; that the land market rent-price ratio is rather low compared to other markets and varies considerably among federal states; and that (expected) premia for land are mostly negative, rendering investments in farmland unprofitable for financial investors. Finally, we find that changing expected present values of returns on land investments are the major driver for land price volatility.

Recent events have highlighted the potential importance of nonlinear efiects of flscal variables (notably debt and deflcits) on interest rates: While in times when government solvency is not a concern the standard crowding-out efiects are of moderate magnitude, in times when default risk becomes an issue the interest rate efiects can become very large. This paper provides new evidence on the magnitude of these efiects. For the case when default risk is not a concern, it uses an arbitrage-free term structure model to estimate the dynamic efiects of flscal policy shocks on interest rates along the entire maturity spectrum. For the case when default risk becomes a concern (thereby violating a central assumption of the term structure model), I present evidence based on EMU government bond spread regressions on time-varying efiects of national flscal policies on spreads as well as the time-varying sensitivity of yield spreads to international risk aversion as a function of the state of flscal policy. JEL classiflcation: E6, H6.

Notwithstanding the financial slowdown and severity of the Coronavirus pandemic during 2020, several retail investors ventures directly to the secondary equities market, setting off gigantic purchasing. A review of SEBI data indicates that over 6 million new dematerialization accounts between April and September 2020 are about 125 percent growth on year on year basis. At the same time, data reported by AMFI shows net outflows from equity funds by retail investors. These data points indicate that retail investors may have opted to invest using direct stock investments instead of relying on the equity mutual fund manager. Equity Investment is a dynamic process requiring and require considering different variables in selecting and, more importantly, avoiding stocks. The cornerstone of wealth creation is to invest in stores at a price considerably smaller than their intrinsic value. The very foundation of creating long-term wealth using equities is deeply embedded. One is buying businesses at a price substantially below its intrinsic value (intrinsic value indicates the entity's future cash flows after estimating the number of accounting risk, macro-economic, managerial, and behavioral risk determinants). This Literature review, therefore, is organized to cover Behavioral, Accounting, Macro-economic, Volatility, and Management theories and Forecasting and ML techniques for clustering, predictions, and classification to support risk decisions using different models, e.g., ARIMA, LSTM, VAR, Facebook Prophet, ARCH and GARCH family models, etc. The literature review also establishes that the concept of risk is highly subjective and is perceived by different investors differently; it is not always entirely objective and outside the beliefs, cognitive and socio-cultural considerations requiring careful assessment before making investment decisions. However, examining the critical risk indicators would allow investors to make a more informed decision. The research gap and identified agenda for further review were defined and assessed using valuable ABCD and SWOT management frameworks. Consequently, the literature investigation findings are analyzed by offering recommendations for creating a comprehensive research agenda pertinent to long-term equity investors in the Indian Equity market.

Notwithstanding the financial slowdown and severity of the Coronavirus pandemic during 2020, several retail investors ventures directly to the secondary equities market, setting off gigantic purchasing. A review of SEBI data indicates that over 6 million new dematerialization accounts between April and September 2020 are about 125 percent growth on year on year basis. At the same time, data reported by AMFI shows net outflows from equity funds by retail investors. These data points indicate that retail investors may have opted to invest using direct stock investments instead of relying on the equity mutual fund manager. Equity Investment is a dynamic process requiring and require considering different variables in selecting and, more importantly, avoiding stocks. The cornerstone of wealth creation is to invest in stores at a price considerably smaller than their intrinsic value. The very foundation of creating long-term wealth using equities is deeply embedded. One is buying businesses at a price substantially below its intrinsic value (intrinsic value indicates the entity's future cash flows after estimating the number of accounting risk, macro-economic, managerial, and behavioral risk determinants). This Literature review, therefore, is organized to cover Behavioral, Accounting, Macro-economic, Volatility, and Management theories and Forecasting and ML techniques for clustering, predictions, and classification to support risk decisions using different models, e.g., ARIMA, LSTM, VAR, Facebook Prophet, ARCH and GARCH family models, etc. The literature review also establishes that the concept of risk is highly subjective and is perceived by different investors differently; it is not always entirely objective and outside the beliefs, cognitive and socio-cultural considerations requiring careful assessment before making investment decisions. However, examining the critical risk indicators would allow investors to make a more informed decision. The research gap and identified agenda for further review were defined and assessed using valuable ABCD and SWOT management frameworks. Consequently, the literature investigation findings are analyzed by offering recommendations for creating a comprehensive research agenda pertinent to long-term equity investors in the Indian Equity market.

The impact of government domestic borrowing on the private sector credit has been a subject of great interest to researchers in finance. This study looked at the impact of government domestic borrowing on private sector credit in Nigeria. Government domestic borrowing can affect the private sector by crowding out private sector credit directly or indirectly through rising interest rates. The study employed an ex-post research methodology. Secondary data was collected from the Debt Management Office Nigeria and the Central Bank of Nigeria. The study covered a 10-year period from 2009 to 2018. An OLS multiple regression model was used. Government domestic borrowing was proxied by federal government bond issuances as the dependent variable. The deposit money banks’ prime lending rates, private sector lending by the banks, the bank’s investment in treasury bills and government bonds were the independent variables. The data was tested for heteroscedasticity, stationarity, normality, multicollinearity and serial correlation to examine the robustness of the model. The results showed that prime lending rate has a positive effect on government bond issuance although not significant. The findings also indicated that there is a negative relationship between government domestic bond issuance and the banks credit to private sector. However, this relationship is not statistically significant implying that government borrowing may not have crowded-out private sector. The relationship between government bond issuances and bank investment in treasury bills and government bond is negative although not significant. The findings of this study suggest that government domestic borrowing in Nigeria may have resulted in the reduction of private credit and this works through the credit channel and the interest rate channel.

Cross-Asset Skew

PurposeMany studies have shown that from a theoretical and empirical point of view, downside risk-based measures of risk are better than the traditional ones. Despite academic appeal and practical implications, downside risk has not been thoroughly examined in markets outside developed country markets. Using downside beta as a measure of downside risk, this study examines the relationship between downside beta and stock returns in Indian equity market, an emerging market with unique investor, asset and market characteristics.Design/methodology/approachThis is an empirical study done by using ranked portfolio return analysis and regression analysis methodologies.FindingsThe study results show that downside risk, as measured by downside beta, is distinctly priced in the Indian equity market. There is a direct positive relationship between downside beta and contemporaneous realized returns, indicating a premium for downside risk. Downside risk carries a higher weightage than upside potential in the aggregate return of the stock portfolios. Downside beta is a better measure of systematic risk than conventional market beta and downside coskewness.Practical implicationsThe empirical results support the adoption of downside beta in practice and provide a case for replacing traditional beta with downside beta in asset pricing applications, trading and investment strategies, and capital allocation decision-making.Originality/valueThis is one of the first in-depth studies examining downside beta in Indian equity markets using a broad sample of individual stock returns covering a wide time range of 22 years. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one to compare downside beta and downside coskewness using individual stock data from the Indian equity market.

The present study is the first of its kind capturing information transmissions among the US and BRIC equity markets through the creation of a total spillover index across the years 2004–2014 and average directional volatility spillovers by employing ARMA (1,1) EGARCH-M (1,1) model and Diebold and Yilmaz’s (Int J Forecast 28(1):57–66, 2011) generalized spillover index under vector autoregression framework. The results spotlight increasing volatility spillover effects or information transmissions during adverse market scenarios, i.e. there are bi-directional volatility spillover effects among the markets undertaken; even confirmed by Markov regime switching model results. On an average, around 38 $$\,\%$$ of the variations are accounted due to the spillover effects. At the same time, both the US and Brazilian markets are found to be net transmitters of volatility, whereas the rest of the markets are net receivers of volatility. The Indian equity market is greatly affected by cross market variations, whereas the Brazilian equity market is found to be the dominant transmitter of volatility. The findings have important implications for international portfolio risk managers and different institutional investors.

Multi-scale representations are effective in characterising the time-frequency characteristics of financial return series. They have the capability to reveal the properties not evident with typical time domain analysis. Given the aforesaid, this study derives crucial insights from multi scale analysis to investigate the co- movements between Indian and emerging Asian equity markets using wavelet correlation and wavelet coherence measures. It is reported that the Indian equity market is strongly integrated with Asian equity markets at lower frequency scales and relatively less blended at higher frequencies. On the other hand the results from cross correlations suggest that the lead-lag relationship becomes substantial as we turn to lower frequency scales and finally, wavelet coherence demonstrates that this correlation eventually grows strong in the interim of the crises period at lower frequency scales. Overall the findings are relevant and have strong policy and practical implications.

This paper examines the dynamic dependence and extreme co-movements between real estate and equity markets in China. We illustrate these ideas in simple empirical settings, implementing the relatively techniques from copulas. When comparing the real estate indices and equity market indices in China, our results show that series in both Shanghai Exchange and Shenzhen Exchange exhibit tail dependence with their respective equity indices. Time-varying SJC copula is the optimal dependence structure while illustrate the extreme co-movement between real estate and equity markets in China.

Investor Herding Behaviour in the Indian Equity Market: Evidence From Quantile Regression