Gold and the Stock Market: 3 Essays on Gold Investments

This thesis gives an overview of the history of gold per se, of gold as an investment good and offers some institutional details about gold and other precious metal markets. The goal of this study is to investigate the role of gold as a store of value and hedge against negative market movements in turbulent times. I investigate gold’s ability to act as a safe haven during periods of financial stress by employing instrumental variable techniques that allow for time varying conditional covariance. I find broad evidence supporting the view that gold acts as an anchor of stability during market downturns. During periods of high uncertainty and low stock market returns, gold tends to have higher than average excess returns. The effectiveness of gold as a safe haven is enhanced during periods of extreme crises: the largest peaks are observed during the global financial crises of 2007-2009 and, in particular, during the Lehman default (October 2008). A further goal of this thesis is to investigate whether gold provides protection from tail risk. I address the issue of asymmetric precious metal behavior conditioned to stock market performance and provide empirical evidence about the contribution of gold to a portfolio’s systematic skewness and kurtosis. I find that gold has positive coskewness with the market portfolio when the market is skewed to the left. Moreover, gold shows low cokurtosis with the market returns during volatile periods. I therefore show that gold is a desirable investment good to risk averse investors, since it tends to decrease the probability of experiencing extreme bad outcomes, and the magnitude of losses in case such events occur. Gold thus bears very important and under-researched characteristics as an asset class per se, which this thesis contributed to address and unveil.

Shareholder protection and stock market development

The dissertation contains five parts: An introduction, three major chapters, and a short conclusion. The First Chapter starts from a survey and discussion of the studies on corporate law and financial development literature. The commonly used methods in these cross-sectional analyses are biased as legal origins are no longer valid instruments. Hence, the model uncertainty becomes a salient problem. The Bayesian Model Averaging algorithm is applied to test the robustness of empirical results in Djankov et al. (2008). The analysis finds that their constructed legal index is not robustly correlated with most of the various stock market outcome variables. The second Chapter looks into the effects of minority shareholders protection in corporate governance regime on entrepreneurs' ex ante incentives to undertake IPO. Most of the current literature focuses on the beneficial part of minority shareholder protection on valuation, while overlooks its private costs on entrepreneur's control. As a result, the entrepreneur trade-offs the costs of monitoring with the benefits of cheap sources of finance when minority shareholder protection improves. The theoretical predictions are empirically tested using panel data and GMM-sys estimator. The third Chapter investigates the corporate law and corporate governance reform in China. The corporate law in China regards shareholder control as the means to the ends of pursuing the interests of stakeholders, which is inefficient. The Chapter combines the recent development of theories of the firm, i.e., the team production theory and the property rights theory, to solve such problem. The enlightened shareholder value, which emphasizes on the long term valuation of the firm, should be adopted as objectives of listed firms. In addition, a move from the mandatory division of power between shareholder meeting and board meeting to the default regime, is proposed.

The social construction of cooperation: exchange, identification and collective intentions within the organization

My aim is to develop a theory of cooperation within the organization and empirically test it. Drawing upon social exchange theory, social identity theory, the idea of collective intentions, and social constructivism, the main assumption of my work implies that both cooperation and the organization itself are continually shaped and restructured by actions, judgments, and symbolic interpretations of the parties involved. Therefore, I propose that the decision to cooperate, expressed say as an intention to cooperate, reflects and depends on a three step social process shaped by the interpretations of the actors involved. The first step entails an instrumental evaluation of cooperation in terms of social exchange. In the second step, this “social calculus” is translated into cognitive, emotional and evaluative reactions directed toward the organization. Finally, once the identification process is completed and membership awareness is established, I propose that individuals will start to think largely in terms of “We” instead of “I”. Self-goals are redefined at the collective level, and the outcomes for self, others, and the organization become practically interchangeable. I decided to apply my theory to an important cooperative problem in management research: knowledge exchange within organizations. Hence, I conducted a quantitative survey among the members of the virtual community, “www.borse.it” (n=108). Within this community, members freely decide to exchange their knowledge about the stock market among themselves. Because of the confirmatory requirements and the structural complexity of the theory proposed (i.e., the proposal that instrumental evaluations will induce social identity and this in turn will causes collective intentions), I use Structural Equation Modeling to test all hypotheses in this dissertation. The empirical survey-based study found support for the theory of cooperation proposed in this dissertation. The findings suggest that an appropriate conceptualization of the decision to exchange knowledge is one where collective intentions depend proximally on social identity (i.e., cognitive identification, affective commitment, and evaluative engagement) with the organization, and this identity depends on instrumental evaluations of cooperators (i.e., perceived value of the knowledge received, assessment of past reciprocity, expected reciprocity, and expected social outcomes of the exchange). Furthermore, I find that social identity fully mediates the effects of instrumental motives on collective intentions.

Il conflitto fra trasparenza sui mercati finanziari ed esigenza di riservatezza della società

The thesis main topic is the conflict between disclosure in financial markets and the need for confidentiality of the firm. After a recognition of the major dynamics of information production and dissemination in the stock market, the analysis moves to the interactions between the information that a firm is tipically interested in keeping confidential, such as trade secrets or the data usually covered by patent protection, and the countervailing demand for disclosure arising from finacial markets. The analysis demonstrates that despite the seeming divergence between informational contents tipically disclosed to investors and information usually covered by intellectual property protection, the overlapping areas are nonetheless wide and the conflict between transparency in financial markets and the firm’s need for confidentiality arises frequently and sistematically. Indeed, the company’s disclosure policy is based on a continuous trade-off between the costs and the benefits related to the public dissemination of information. Such costs are mainly represented by the competitive harm caused by competitors’ access to sensitive data, while the benefits mainly refer to the lower cost of capital that the firm obtains as a consequence of more disclosure. Secrecy shields the value of costly produced information against third parties’ free riding and constitutes therefore a means to protect the firm’s incentives toward the production of new information and especially toward technological and business innovation. Excessively demanding standards of transparency in financial markets might hinder such set of incentives and thus jeopardize the dynamics of innovation production. Within Italian securities regulation, there are two sets of rules mostly relevant with respect to such an issue: the first one is the rule that mandates issuers to promptly disclose all price-sensitive information to the market on an ongoing basis; the second one is the duty to disclose in the prospectus all the information “necessary to enable investors to make an informed assessment” of the issuers’ financial and economic perspectives. Both rules impose high disclosure standards and have potentially unlimited scope. Yet, they have safe harbours aimed at protecting the issuer need for confidentiality. Despite the structural incompatibility between public dissemination of information and the firm’s need to keep certain data confidential, there are certain ways to convey information to the market while preserving at the same time the firm’s need for confidentality. Such means are insider trading and selective disclosure: both are based on mechanics whereby the process of price reaction to the new information takes place without any corresponding activity of public release of data. Therefore, they offer a solution to the conflict between disclosure and the need for confidentiality that enhances market efficiency and preserves at the same time the private set of incentives toward innovation.