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Explaining the Value Premium around the World: Risk or Mispricing?. Discussant: Yanzhi Wang Department of Finance National Taiwan University. Main findings.
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Explaining the Value Premium around the World: Risk or Mispricing? Discussant: Yanzhi Wang Department of Finance National Taiwan University
Main findings • This paper empirically examines the predictions of the risk-based explanation versus the mispricing hypothesis with limits-to-arbitrage on the value premium around the world. • The authors use the uncertainty avoidance index and the individualism index to measure investors’ attitudes-toward-risk and use the transaction cost index and market development measures to proxy for limits-to-arbitrage. • Our cross-country results in general appear to be consistent with the risk-based explanation but fail to support the mispricing hypothesis. • This paper is interesting and comprehensive, I think this paper prefect. All my comments could be wrong, yet I still have to be picky as a discussant.
Tests on mispricing story • Market cap and index of access to equity markets are originally constructed and used by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer (2006) to proxy for equity market development. • These two measures seem to be capture the cost that firm initially finance at the equity market, which is for primary market. Yet limit-to-arbitrage seems to be the issue in the secondary market. For example, we seldom make arbitrage when one firm goes IPO. • Thus, I am asking myself whether a country with high market cap (or high access-to-equity index) has low degree of limit-to-arbitrage?
Tests on mispricing story • Try idiosyncratic volatility, price, trading volume as the limit-to-arbitrage proxy (Lam and Wei, 2011)? How can we interpret these firm-level limit-to-arbitrage proxies and those currently employed country-level limit-to-arbitrage proxies? • Could endogeneity concern be a good reason? Firm-level limit-to-arbitrage measures could be greatly affected by B/M or vice versa. • What else?
Tests on mispricing story • Daniel and Titman (2006) intangible return • Upon the B/M decomposition, future stock return is related to intangible return. • If firms with low intangible return are more likely to be undervalued, then we can test this using your global data. • Yet the price-adjust factor could not be available for many countries. • How about prior return as another indicator for mispricing (Peyer and Vermaelen, 2009) • For low prior return subsample, do limits-to-arbitrage variables work?
Test on risk story • Pontiff and Woodgate (2008) show slopes of NS from Fama-MacBeth regression in time series. This paper can do the same thing to show the risk. • Slopes should go around zero and be more volatile for those countries with high uncertainty avoidance index (or low individualism index)
Methodology issue • Long-term impact (Pontiff and Woodgate, 2008; 2009) • Use one-month, one-year, two-year and three-year BHR as dependent variables in Fama-MacBeth regression. • Some additional control variables (see Table 7 of Pontiff and Woodgate, 2009). For example, • Law origin • investor protection (La Porta, Lopezde- Silanes, and Shleifer, 2006) • Earnings management (Leuz, Nanda, and Wysocki, 2003)