Chapter 11 - Efficient Markets and Behavioral Finance

CHAPTER 11
Efficient Markets and Behavioral Finance

Answers to Problem Sets

1. c
 
2. Weak, semistrong, strong, strong, weak.
 
3. a. False

b. False

c. True

d. False

e. False

f. True
 

4. a. False - In what kind of markets do financing decisions occur? Investment

Decisions occur where?

b. False -

c. True – what information do stocks not reflect?

d. False- returns are the same for what kind of stocks?

 

5. 6 - (-.2 + 1.45 X 5) = -1.05%.

 

6. a. True

b. False

c. True

d. True – can managers increase EPS?

 

7. Decrease. The stock price already reflects an expected 25% increase. The 20%

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increase conveys bad news relative to expectations.

 
8. a. Executives should not plan on issuing shares based on apparent trends or
cycles in their company’s stock price.

b. Executives can observe their company’s stock price change and use the
change as a reliable source of market-based information about the future
prospects of the company. Stock price changes are the best forecast of
a company’s future earnings as well as the best forecast future industry
earnings.

c. A financial manager evaluating the creditworthiness of a large customer

could check the customer’s stock price and the yield on its debt. A falling
stock price or a high yield could indicate trouble ahead.

d. Don’t assume that accounting choices that increase or decrease earnings

will have any effect on stock price.

e. The company should not seek diversification just to reduce risk. Investors
can diversify on their own. They can also create their own dividends and
they can lever-up for themselves.

f. Stock issuances do not depress price by increasing supply, and buybacks

do not increase price by reducing supply (assuming no inside information
is released by the issuance or buyback). Why? Because the supply of
stock with a given Beta is infinity. There is an infinite number of shares
traded in the market place with the same Beta.

9. a. Evidence that two securities with identical cash flows (e.g. Royal Dutch
Shell and Shell Transport & Trading) can sell at different prices.

b. Small-cap stocks and high book-to-market stocks appear to have given

above-average returns for their level of risk.

c. IPOs provide relatively low returns after their first few days of trading.

d. Stocks of firms that announce unexpectedly good earnings perform well

over the coming months.

In each case there appear to have been opportunities for earning superior profits.

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10. a. An individual can do crazy things, but still not affect the efficiency of
markets. The price of the asset in an efficient market is a consensus price
as well as a marginal price. A nutty person may be willing to give
stocks/bonds away for free or willing to offer to pay twice the market value.
However, market exchanges have specialists that must maintain price
stability in efficient markets, thereby protecting crazy investors. Even if
they trade in the market in an “irrational” manner, they can be buy or sell
at the current market price, which is a fair price since the price reflects all
information.

b. Yes, and how many people have dropped a bundle? Or, more to the
point, how many people have made a bundle only to lose it later? And
how many people talk only about their gains, but do not talk about their
losses. In the short-run, People can be lucky and some people can be
very lucky; efficient markets do not preclude this possibility, but in the
long-run they eventually earn a fair return for the risk level at which they
invest.

c. Investor psychology is a slippery concept, more often than not used to

explain price movements that the individual invoking it cannot personally
explain. Even if it exists, is there any way to make money from it? If
investor psychology drives up the price one day, will it do so the next day
also? Or will the price drop to a ‘true’ level? Almost no one can tell you
beforehand what ‘investor psychology’ will do. Theories based on it have
no content.

d. What good is a stable “value” when you can’t buy or sell at that value? If it
can’t be traded at that price, then it is artificial and not a true value. It is the
market price, which captures all available information, and the price at
which you can buy or sell today that determines value.

11. a. Would it be more fair if MBAs could be taught how to forecast future stock
price movements? Then, the rich (who could afford an MBA) could always
get richer and the poor could never earn as much as the rich. But if stock
prices are random in the short-run and earn fair returns for risk levels in
the long-run, then everyone who buys a well-diversified portfolio is better-
off in the long-run. It is a positive-sum game for everyone. The random
walk of values is not roulette, it is simply the result of rational investors
digesting new information that flows into the world randomly.

b. To make the example clearer, assume that everyone believes in the same
chart. What happens when the chart shows a downward movement? Are
investors going to be willing to hold the stock when it has an expected
loss? Of course not. They start selling, and the price will decline until the
stock is expected to give a positive return. The trend will ‘self-destruct.’

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c. Random-walk theory as applied to efficient markets means that

fluctuations from the expected outcome are random. Suppose there is an
80 percent chance of rain tomorrow (because it rained today). Then the
local umbrella store’s stock price will respond today to the expected
prospect of high umbrella sales tomorrow. The store’s umbrella sales will
not follow a random walk, but its stock price will be random, because each
day the stock price changes in response to the success or failure in
meeting expected umbrella sales.

12. One of the ways to think about market inefficiency is that it implies there is easy
money to be made. The following appear to suggest market inefficiency:
(a) efficient, weak and semi-strong. Most investors, and certainly all
marginal investors know that muni bond yields reflect their tax-exempt
status.
(b) strong form, inefficient. They may go to jail, but they can earn excess
returns because they have inside information.
(c) Semi-strong, efficient. The market is the best forecast of future
corporate performance (i.e. profits)
(d) weak form, inefficient. Past trends do not forecast future trends.
(e) strong form, efficient. The market is pricing the merger (which is
inside information) before the information is released.
(f) weak form, inefficient. past information cannot forecast future prices.
(g) semi-strong form, efficient. All marginal investors understand that
returns are associated with Beta, and not total variance.

13. The estimates are first substituted in the market model. Then the result from this
expected return equation is subtracted from the actual return for the month to
obtain the abnormal return.
Abnormal return (Intel) = Actual return – [(−0.57) + (1.08  Market return)]
Abnormal return (Conagra) = Actual return – [(-0.46) + (0.65  Market return)]

14. The efficient market hypothesis does not imply that portfolio selection should be
done with a pin. The manager still has three important jobs to do. First, she
must make sure that the portfolio is well diversified. It should be noted that a
large number of stocks is not enough to ensure diversification. Second, she
must make sure that the risk of the diversified portfolio is appropriate for the
manager’s clients. Third, she might want to tailor the portfolio to take advantage
of special tax laws for pension funds. These laws may make it possible to
increase the expected return of the portfolio without increasing risk.

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15. They are both under the illusion that markets are predictable and they are
wasting their time trying to guess the market’s direction. Remember the first
lesson of market efficiency: Markets have no memory. The decision as to when
to issue stock should be made without reference to ‘market cycles.’

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16. The efficient-market hypothesis says that there is no easy way to make money.
Thus, when such an opportunity seems to present itself, we should be very
skeptical. For example:
 In the case of short- versus long-term rates, and borrowing short-term versus
long-term, there are different risks involved. For example, suppose that we
need the money long-term but we borrow short-term. When the short-term
note is due, we must somehow refinance. However; this may not be possible,
or may be possible only at a very high interest rate.
 In the case of Japanese versus United States interest rates, there is the risk
that the Japanese yen - U.S. dollar exchange rate will change during the
period of time for which we have borrowed.

17. This does present some evidence against the efficient capital market hypothesis.
One key to market efficiency is the high level of competition among participants
in the market. For small stocks, the level of competition is relatively low because
major market participants (e.g., mutual funds and pension funds) are biased
toward holding the securities of larger, well-known companies. Thus, it is
plausible that the market for small stocks is fundamentally different from the
market for larger stocks and, hence, that the small-firm effect is simply a
reflection of market inefficiency.

But there are at least two alternative possibilities. First, this difference might just
be coincidental. In statistical inference, we never prove an affirmative fact. The
best we can do is to accept or reject a specified hypothesis with a given degree
of confidence. Thus, no matter what the outcome of a statistical test, there is
always a possibility, however slight, that the small-firm effect is simply the result
of statistical chance.

Second, firms with small market capitalization may contain some type of
additional risk that is not measured in the studies. Given the information available
and the number of participants, it is hard to believe that any securities market in
the U.S is not very efficient. Thus, the most likely explanation for the small-firm
effect is that the model used to estimate expected returns is incorrect, and that
there is some as-yet-unidentified risk factor.

18. There are several ways to approach this problem, but all (when done correctly!)
should give approximately the same answer. We have chosen to use the
regression analysis function of an electronic spreadsheet program to calculate
the alpha and beta for each security. The regressions are in the following form:
Security return = alpha + (beta  market return) + error term

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The results are:

Alpha Beta
Executive Cheese 0.803 0.956
Paddington Beer -0.834 0.730
The abnormal return for Executive Cheese in February 2007 was:
–2.1 – [0.803 + 0.956  (–7.7)] = 4.31%
For Paddington Beer, the abnormal return was:
–9.4 – [-0.834 + 0.73  (–7.7)] = –2.95%
Thus, the average abnormal return of the two stocks during the month of the
earnings announcement was –0.68%.

19. The market is most likely efficient. The government of Kuwait is not likely to have
non-public information about the BP shares. Goldman Sachs is providing an
intermediary service for which they should be remunerated. Stocks are bought
by investors at (higher) ask prices and sold at (lower) bid prices. The spread
between the two ($0.11) is revenue for the broker. In the U.S., at that time, a bid-
ask spread of 1/8 ($0.125) was not uncommon. The ‘profit’ of $15 million reflects
the size of the order more than any mispricing.

20. Any time there is a separation of ownership and control, it is possible that the
resulting agency costs will lead to market distortions. Many people hire others
(explicitly or implicitly) to manage their money, and these managers may not
have the same incentives to push for the best price. Over large markets, we
might expect many of these distortions to have less impact, but some
imperfections may remain.

As described in the text, one example of this is mortgage securitization market.

Because banks were paid a fee for packaging the securities and did not retain
the risks of ownership, they may not have pushed for adequate underwriting.
This may have lead to easy credit terms and a housing market bubble.

21. Opinion question; answers will vary. Some of the blame may indeed rest with
borrowers who held overly-optimistic views of housing market appreciation and of
their ability to repay mortgages. Similarly, purchasers of mortgage backed
securities may have unwisely believed that these instruments offered an
adequate return. Alternative explanations include inaccurate ratings, agency cost
problems (where loan originators lacked incentives to underwrite the loans
effectively, the purchase activity and implicit government backing of Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac, and other information asymmetry problems.

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22. a. The probability that mutual fund X achieved superior performance in any
one year is 0.50. The probability that mutual fund X achieved superior performance in
each of the past ten years is:
0.510 = 0.00097656

b. The probability that, out of 10,000 mutual funds, none of them obtained
ten successive years of superior performance is:
(1 – 0.00097656)10,000 = 0.00005712
Therefore, the probability that at least one of the 10,000 mutual funds
obtained ten successive years of superior performance is:
1 – 0.00005712 = 0.99994288

23. It is difficult to define ex ante rules for identifying bubbles where prices differ from
some measure of intrinsic value. Research in this area focuses on excessive
liquidity, inflationary pressures, a rigorous analysis of “underlying fundamentals,”
and other factors that may cause prices to exceed intrinsic value (whatever that
means). But since we expect prices to move in a random walk—and since this
random walk might sometimes move rapidly upwards—the process of identifying
bubbles is vexing.

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