Dr Md Lutfur Rahman

This article examines the relationship between the financial risk-taking behavior of individual investors and their subjective and objective knowledge. The data come from multiple waves of surveys conducted by the National Financial Capability Study between 2009 and 2018. We hypothesize that subjective knowledge will have a greater association with risk tolerance than objective knowledge of individual investors. Regression models are estimated with least squares as well as with the ordered logit method. Estimation results show that individual investors¿ risk tolerance behavior is associated more with their subjective knowledge than their objective knowledge. This is true in all four surveys separately and in the combined sample. Additionally, as hypothesized, the relative influence of subjective knowledge on risk tolerance, compared to objective knowledge, increases as the survey periods move further away from the financial recession of2007-2008. This article has important implications for behavioral and personal finance researchers, financial advisors, and regulators.

Growth of the small and medium-size enterprise (SME) sector is traditionally an important driver of overall economic growth, particularly in emerging economies. SME growth is enhanced by access to finance (financial inclusion). In this study, we show that efficient working capital management has a positive influence on performance that is independent of the effect of financial inclusion. Our results remain robust to alternative measurements and estimations, and may be useful to national policy-makers in developing strategies for SMEs' greater access to finance and introducing ways of improving financial management education and training for SME managers.

This paper compares the tail dependence and risk spillovers from the oil and gas to high-yield (HY) and investment grade (IG) bond markets. We use time-varying optimal copula framework to examine the dependence and further quantify upside and downside risk spillovers. We also explore how energy futures can be used to hedge risk of HY and IG bond portfolios. Our results show that the bond returns are more sensitive to risk shocks in the oil market compared to gas market. We find both negative and positive tail dependence between the bond and energy pairs and the relationship is stronger during the oil-crunch period. The dependence however is asymmetric across the tails. Finally, compared to oil futures, gas futures are found to be better hedge for the bond investment. These results can help in managing portfolio risk and designing optimal asset allocation strategies. These might also assist in formulating policies and regulations to manage the effects of cross-market risk transmissions.

The Australian financial sector (AFS) is highly concentrated and interconnected. Besides, Australian banks' lending portfolios are dominated by residential mortgage loans, and 70% of insurance companies' revenues arise from non-policyholder sources. The AFS also performed relatively well during the global financial crisis (GFC). Given these distinctive features, in this paper, we examine the systemic risk contribution of Australian banks, insurance companies, and other financial services providers. We use a flexible copula-based delta conditional value-at-risk (¿CoVaR) method across different frequencies. Further, we study the systemic risk determinants in a panel setting. We find that the major Australian banks are systemically more important than all other financial institutions. Systemic risk is typically higher after the GFC than in the pre-crisis period, despite the introduction of more stringent capital requirements. In addition, the short-term ¿CoVaR is significantly higher than the medium- and long-term ¿CoVaRs. Finally, institution-specific characteristics and market-wide variables explain the cross-sectional and time-series variation in systemic risk, and their explanatory power varies across frequencies.

India is one of the very few national jurisdictions to introduce a regulation mandating spending on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Although the directive has increased CSR spending significantly, it has experienced a widespread noncompliance. This paper examines the effect of institutional ownership on the likelihood of violations of the mandatory CSR regulation. Using a sample of over 4000 firm-year observations, we find that an increase in institutional ownership significantly increases firms¿ compliance with the mandatory CSR expenditure requirement. This result is robust to the alternative definitions of mandatory CSR violations, alternative model estimation approaches, addressing endogeneity and reverse causality biases and controlling for firms¿ group affiliation, and ownership of foreign investors and government.

In this study, we examine the quantile dependence between Islamic and non-Islamic equity returns using the cross-quantilogram approach. We find that Islamic and non-Islamic equity markets are predominantly independent of each other when both markets are in normal (middle quantile) and bullish (upper quantile) states. However, when the markets are in a bearish state (lower quantile), a positive dependence emerges, which becomes stronger and persistent once the uncertainty measures are controlled for and during financial crises. We also show that investors can derive diversification and hedging benefits by strategically combining Islamic and non-Islamic equities in their portfolios.

We investigate the dynamics of interdependence between realized variances and realized semivariances of six major currencies across frequencies and time scales. The empirical results are derived, first, through constructing daily measures of realized variance and semivariance from a high frequency 5-min interval data, and second, by fitting wavelet squared coherence and wavelet cohesion measure with time-varying weights. The realized volatilities of the currencies and their cross-currency influences are found to increase during the global financial crisis. The realized volatilities of the Euro, Swiss Franc, and British Pound are closely synchronized over the short-term horizon. However, over the long-run, the Euro, Swiss Franc, and Japanese Yen lead the realized volatilities of the British Pound, Australian Dollar, and Canadian Dollar. The synchronization structure of positive and negative realized volatilities indicates asymmetric dependence among the currencies across time horizons. We further observe strong positive (negative) cohesion among the realized volatilities over the medium- and long-term horizons. Finally, significant counter cyclical comovements among the currencies are observed over the medium- and long-term horizons. These findings have important implications for foreign exchange portfolio managers.

We examine how the Australian stock market responded to the uncertainties created by the COVID-19 pandemic and whether the stimulus package offered by the Government helped restore confidence in the market. This study finds a negative stock market reaction to the pandemic announcement, however, among two stimulus packages related announcements, the market reacted positively only to ¿JobKeeper¿ package. The cross-sectional results suggest that the smallest, least profitable and value portfolios suffered more during the pandemic. Finally, size and liquidity are found to be the significant drivers of abnormal returns. These results generally hold for a battery of robustness checks.

This paper is the first to examine the dynamic impact of temperature anomaly and macroeconomic fundamentals on agricultural commodity futures returns. Using a quantile regression approach, we report that temperature anomaly exerts a significant negative (positive) impact on returns of soybean, corn, cotton, and coffee (soybean, corn, and cocoa) futures in extreme bearish and bullish market conditions. Moreover, agricultural commodity futures returns appear to positively respond to aggregate stock returns and negatively influenced by exchange rate changes. However, such results vary across quantiles. We also report that economic activities and various uncertainty measures do not have a strong impact on the returns of agricultural commodity futures. Our study suggests that an adjustment in risk evaluation encompassing weather shocks would benefit portfolio management.

This paper examines (i) the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent government policy responses, and (ii) their firm-level determinants in the context of Asia Pacific financial markets. The study is built on 3278 companies from 7 countries. It is found that the declaration of the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic resulted in a significant negative impact on the stock returns (the cumulative average abnormal returns range from -7.35% to -26.21% for a [-5, 5] window period) with few exceptions. The results further indicate that although government stimulus packages somewhat calmed the markets, these policy responses, in general, failed to rebuild investors' confidence. The cross-sectional regression reveals that low leverage, low volatility, cash-rich, growth and good corporate governance firms were less vulnerable to the pandemic. However, firms' stock price responses to the crisis were invariant to their CSR engagement, features of the corporate board, and executive compensation structure.

This paper re-examines the static and time-varying asymmetries in quantile-specific relationship between gold returns and gold mining companies' stock returns. In doing so, we use novel cross-quantilogram approach that is built on quantiles of both distributions and control for the effect of crude oil price changes, overall stock market movements, stock market volatility and economic policy uncertainty. We find that the gold returns negatively predict the gold stock returns around the median quantile. Whereas the gold returns positively depend on the gold mining companies¿ stock returns in the low and high quantiles. We therefore, support for an embedded real option in gold for gold mining companies which is time-varying and occurs in very short-run. This finding is useful for devising portfolio allocation and diversification strategies.

Purpose: India has mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) expenditure under Section 135 of the Indian Companies Act, 2013 ¿ the first national jurisdiction to do so. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of mandated CSR expenditure on firms¿ stock returns by using actual CSR spending data, whereas the previous studies mostly focus on voluntary CSR proxied by CSR scores. Design/methodology/approach: The authors estimate their baseline regression by using ordinary least squares(OLS) method. Although the baseline regression involving CSR expenditure and stock returns using ordinary least squares method are estimated, endogeneity and reverse causality biases are addressed by using two-stage least squares and generalized method of moments approaches. These approaches contribute mitigating endogeneity bias and biases associated with unobserved heterogeneity and simultaneity. Findings: The findings document that mandatory CSR expenditure has a negative impact on firms¿ stock returns which supports the ¿shareholders¿ expense¿ view. This result remain robust after controlling for endogeneity bias and the use of both standard and robust test statistics. The authors however observe that this result holds for the firms with actual CSR expenditure equal to the mandated amount but does not hold for the firms with actual CSR expenditure greater than the mandated amount. Therefore, the authors provide evidence that CSR expenditure¿s impact on stock returns depends on whether firms simply comply the regulation or voluntarily chose an amount of CSR expenditure above the mandated amount. Originality/value: The primary contribution is to present a valid and robust evidence of negative effect of mandated CSR spending on firms¿ stock returns when the mandatory CSR spending rule is already in place. This study contributes by examining the impact of mandated CSR spending on stock during post-implementation period (2015-2017), whereas other studies by Dharampala and Khanna (2018); Kapoor and Dhamija (2017); and Mukherjee et al. (2018) mainly examined the impact of legislation on Indian CSR. The authors use mandated actual CSR expenditure, whereas previous studies mostly focus on voluntary CSR proxied by CSR scores.

Predictive models of stock returns are often criticized for generating spurious predictability, unstable predictive relationship, and poor out-of-sample forecasting performance. This paper addresses these issues in the context of four major South Asian equity markets. We provide a bias-corrected estimate of the relationship of future stock returns to dividend yield and interest rate. We use a restricted vector autoregressive model, draw statistical inferences from a wild-bootstrap method with superior size and power properties, and allow model parameters to vary over time. Dividend yield is a significant predictor in both in- and out-of-sample (OOS)in two countries, while interest rate exhibits significant predictability in all four markets. Imposing theoretically motivated restrictions on model parameters appears to improve OOS predictability. Finally, time-variation in return predictability is found to be linked to countercyclical risk premium and persistence of the predictor variables.

We study the cross-quantile dependence of renewable energy (RE) stock returns on aggregate stock returns, changes in oil and gold prices, and exchange rates. Applying a recently developed cross-quantilogram approach, we provide two novel findings. First, although prior studies show that RE stock returns have a positive dependence on changes in oil prices and in the aggregate stock index, we find that the relationship is not symmetric across quantiles and that this asymmetry is higher in longer lags. Second, while the extant literature provides evidence that exchange rates and gold returns exert a positive influence on aggregate stock returns, we report that this positive influence on RE stock returns is observed only during extreme market conditions. These results are robust, (i) even after controlling for economic policy and equity market uncertainties, as well as (ii) in both a time-static full sample and recursive subsamples.

This paper examines the nonlinear effect of oil price shocks on precious metal returns using Markov regime switching regression. We use Ready's (2018) approach to decompose oil price changes into supply, demand, and risk driven shocks. Results indicate a significant positive impact of demand and supply shocks and a negative impact of risk shocks on precious metal returns. Although we find evidence of switching between low and high volatility regimes, we do not find strong regime effect on supply or demand shocks' contemporaneous relationship with precious metal returns. However, risk shocks' influence on precious metal returns is strongly regime dependent. These results generally hold for different distributional specification of error terms.

This paper examines the cross-quantile dependence between developed and emerging market stock returns and investigates its time-varying characteristics, using recursive sample estimations. The results based on cross-quantilogram approach reveal a heterogeneous quantile relation for the USA, UK, German, and Japanese stock returns to those of the emerging markets. Systematic risk generally does not explain the cross-country dependence structure, since it remains essentially unchanged when controlling for financial, geopolitical, and economic uncertainties. Moreover, the cross-quantile correlation changes over time, especially in the low and high quantiles, indicating that it is prone to jumps and discontinuities, even in a seemingly stable dependence structure. These results are important for institutional investors and market observers.