Identifier

etd-06152016-140854

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Finance

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

This work contains three essays on empirical pricing. In the first essay, I propose to re-examine the evidence on mutual fund managers' illiquidity and volatility timing ability by using a holdings-based approach, which is free from the artificial timing bias occurred in the traditional return-based timing method. Through testing the timing evidence by the holdings approach, I am able to know to what degree the results in the literature are biased by no-information reasons. In the second essay, I investigate mutual fund managers' skills from their reactions to the observable market condition, which is a relatively overlooked dimension in the literature. I propose to distinguish managers' economic motives form their reaction behavior to the public market illiquidity and volatility condition, which brings us new insight into how managers' private incentive affects their investment behaviors. In the third essay, I try to solve the idiosyncratically puzzle in the literature. I show that equity duration plays as a multiple of discount rate news shock and, therefore, affects equity return volatility. I show that the trend of the implied market duration is consistent with the trend of market idiosyncratic volatility as addressed in Campbell et al. (2001).

Date

2016

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Sanger, Gary C.

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.1711

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