Flight to quality? An investigation of changing price spreads in commercial real estate markets

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the crisis on the pricing of asset quality attributes. This paper uses sales transaction data to examine whether flight from risk phenomena took place in the US office market during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Design/methodology/approach – Hedonic regression procedures are used to test the hypothesis that the spread between the pricing of low-quality and high-quality characteristics increased during the crisis period compared to the pre-crisis period. Findings – The results of the hedonic regression models suggest that the price spread between Class A and other properties grew significantly during the downturn. Research limitations/implications – Our results are consistent with the hypothesis of an increased price spread following a market downturn between Class A and non-Class A offices. The evidence suggests that the relationships between the returns on Class A and non-Class A assets changed during the period of market stress or crisis. Practical implications – These findings have implications for real estate portfolio construction. If regime switches can be predicted and/or responded to rapidly, portfolios may be rebalanced. In crisis periods, portfolios might be reweighted towards Class A properties and in positive market periods, the reweighting would be towards non-Class A assets. Social implications – The global financial crisis has demonstrated that real estate markets play a crucial role in modern economies and that negative developments in these markets have the potential to spillover and create contagion for the larger economy, thereby affecting jobs, incomes and ultimately people’s livelihoods. Originality/value – This is one of the first studies that address the flight to quality phenomenon in commercial real estate markets during periods of financial crisis and market turmoil.

Jump and variance risk premia in the S&P 500

We analyze the risk premia embedded in the S&P 500 spot index and option markets. We use a long time-series of spot prices and a large panel of option prices to jointly estimate the diffusive stock risk premium, the price jump risk premium, the diffusive variance risk premium and the variance jump risk premium. The risk premia are statistically and economically significant and move over time. Investigating the economic drivers of the risk premia, we are able to explain up to 63 % of these variations.

Cointegração e price discovery do risco soberano brasileiro

A lei do preço único afirma que o mesmo ativo negociado em diferentes mercados deve apresentar preços equivalentes. Este trabalho busca verificar se o risco de crédito soberano brasileiro negociado no mercado internacional é precificado de forma semelhante tanto nos tradicionais mercados de títulos quanto no novo e crescente mercado de derivativos de crédito. Adicionalmente, utiliza-se a análise de Price Discovery para examinar qual dos mercados se move mais rapidamente em resposta às mudanças nas condições de crédito da economia brasileira. A análise empírica é feita por meio de modelos de séries de tempo, mais especificamente análise de cointegração e vetor de correção de erros. Os resultados confirmam a predição teórica da lei do preço único de que o risco de crédito brasileiro, tanto nos mercados de títulos quanto no mercado de derivativos de crédito, movem-se juntos no longo prazo. Por fim, a maior parte do Price Discovery ocorre no mercado de derivativos de crédito.

Risk sharing and the household collective model

When the joint assumption of optimal risk sharing and coincidence of beliefs is added to the collective model of Browning and Chiappori (1998) income pooling and symmetry of the pseudo-Hicksian matrix are shown to be restored. Because these are also the features of the unitary model usually rejected in empirical studies one may argue that these assumptions are at odds with evidence. We argue that this needs not be the case. The use of cross-section data to generate price and income variation is based Oil a definition of income pooling or symmetry suitable for testing the unitary model, but not the collective model with risk sharing. AIso, by relaxing assumptions on beliefs, we show that symmetry and income pooling is lost. However, with usual assumptions on existence of assignable goods, we show that beliefs are identifiable. More importantly, if di:fferences in beliefs are not too extreme, the risk sharing hypothesis is still testable.

Essays on regulatory risk issues

Most studies around that try to verify the existence of regulatory risk look mainly at developed countries. Looking at regulatory risk in emerging market regulated sectors is no less important to improving and increasing investment in those markets. This thesis comprises three papers comprising regulatory risk issues. In the first Paper I check whether CAPM betas capture information on regulatory risk by using a two-step procedure. In the first step I run Kalman Filter estimates and then use these estimated betas as inputs in a Random-Effect panel data model. I find evidence of regulatory risk in electricity, telecommunications and all regulated sectors in Brazil. I find further evidence that regulatory changes in the country either do not reduce or even increase the betas of the regulated sectors, going in the opposite direction to the buffering hypothesis as proposed by Peltzman (1976). In the second Paper I check whether CAPM alphas say something about regulatory risk. I investigate a methodology similar to those used by some regulatory agencies around the world like the Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency (ANEEL) that incorporates a specific component of regulatory risk in setting tariffs for regulated sectors. I find using SUR estimates negative and significant alphas for all regulated sectors especially the electricity and telecommunications sectors. This runs in the face of theory that predicts alphas that are not statistically different from zero. I suspect that the significant alphas are related to misspecifications in the traditional CAPM that fail to capture true regulatory risk factors. On of the reasons is that CAPM does not consider factors that are proven to have significant effects on asset pricing, such as Fama and French size (ME) and price-to-book value (ME/BE). In the third Paper, I use two additional factors as controls in the estimation of alphas, and the results are similar. Nevertheless, I find evidence that the negative alphas may be the result of the regulated sectors premiums associated with the three Fama and French factors, particularly the market risk premium. When taken together, ME and ME/BE regulated sectors diminish the statistical significance of market factors premiums, especially for the electricity sector. This show how important is the inclusion of these factors, which unfortunately is scarce in emerging markets like Brazil.

PRiMA : project risk management approach

Esta tese propõe uma abordagem sistemática para gerenciar riscos em projetos de software, por meio da adaptação de processos. O objetivo da abordagem é permitir a elaboração de um processo específico para um dado projeto, visando minimizar a exposição do projeto aos riscos, identificados de acordo com o contexto do projeto. As atividades, possíveis de serem executadas em processos de projetos de uma organização, são estruturadas em um framework de processo (PRiMA-F), que inclui também os padrões de processo e organizacionais usados para descrever ações preventivas e corretivas aos riscos. A estruturação do framework básico, construído pela organização, poderá permitir distintas instanciações, como por exemplo, processos de acordo com o paradigma ágil ou planejado, ou em conformidade com normas de qualidade, como CMM e outras; além dos padrões organizacionais e de processo para gestão de riscos de projeto. PRiMA-F define o escopo maior do processo de software da organização e este é adaptado de acordo com os riscos identificados para o projeto e suas necessidades específicas, dando origem ao processo a ser usado no projeto. adaptação. Os guias descrevem como adaptar elementos de processo de acordo com o tamanho e o formalismo do projeto. Configurações de processo são modelos prédefinidos, visando atender projetos típicos ou modelos de qualidade. Prima-F pode ser estendida para novos riscos, padrões e processos, de acordo com as necessidades da organização. Utilizando o paradigma Goal/Question/Metric, no framework de processo (PRiMAF), são definidas métricas do processo de software, associadas aos riscos, para serem usadas para acompanhar o progresso dos fatores de risco, possibilitando ao gerente de projeto tomar ações corretivas, quando necessário e no momento adequado. As ações corretivas são descritas usando padrões organizacionais e de processo. Uma ferramenta de apoio à sistemática proposta (PRiMA-Tool) foi desenvolvida. Estudos de caso foram elaborados para validar a sistemática proposta

Demand aggregation and credit risk effects in pooled procurement: evidence from the Brazilian public purchases of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies

Pooled procurement has an important role in reducing acquisition prices of goods. A pool of buyers, which aggregates demand for its members, increases bargaining power and allows suppliers to achieve economies of scale and scope in the production. Such aggregation demand e ect lowers prices paid for buyers. However, when a buyer with a good reputation for paying suppliers in a timely manner is joined in the pool by a buyer with bad reputation may have its price paid increased due to the credit risk e ect on prices. This will happen because prices paid in a pooled procurement should refect the (higher) average buyers' credit risk. Using a data set on Brazilian public purchases of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, we nd evidence supporting both e ects. We show that the prices paid by public bodies in Brazil are lower when they buy through pooled procurement than individually. On the other hand, federal agencies (i.e. good buyers) pay higher prices for products when they are joined by state agencies (i.e. bad buyers) in a pool. Such evidence suggests that pooled procurement should be carefully designed to avoid that prices paid increase for its members.

Bias and size effects of price-comparison search engines : theory and experimental evidence

We analyze the impact on consumer prices of the size and bias of price comparison search engines. In the context of a model related to Burdett and Judd (1983) and Varian (1980), we develop and test experimentally several theoretical predictions. The experimental results confirm the model’s predictions regarding the impact of the number of firms, and the type of bias of the search engine, but reject the model’s predictions regarding changes in the size of the index. The explanatory power of an econometric model for the price distributions is significantly improved when variables accounting for risk attitudes are introduced.

Nonparametric tail risk, macroeconomics and stock returns: predictability and risk premia

This paper proposes a new novel to calculate tail risks incorporating risk-neutral information without dependence on options data. Proceeding via a non parametric approach we derive a stochastic discount factor that correctly price a chosen panel of stocks returns. With the assumption that states probabilities are homogeneous we back out the risk neutral distribution and calculate five primitive tail risk measures, all extracted from this risk neutral probability. The final measure is than set as the first principal component of the preliminary measures. Using six Fama-French size and book to market portfolios to calculate our tail risk, we find that it has significant predictive power when forecasting market returns one month ahead, aggregate U.S. consumption and GDP one quarter ahead and also macroeconomic activity indexes. Conditional Fama-Macbeth two-pass cross-sectional regressions reveal that our factor present a positive risk premium when controlling for traditional factors.

Wrong-way risk in stock swaps : measuring counterparty credit risk and CVA

Uma forma interessante para uma companhia que pretende assumir uma posição comprada em suas próprias ações ou lançar futuramente um programa de recompra de ações, mas sem precisar dispor de caixa ou ter que contratar um empréstimo, ou então se protegendo de uma eventual alta no preço das ações, é através da contratação de um swap de ações. Neste swap, a companhia fica ativa na variação de sua própria ação enquanto paga uma taxa de juros pré ou pós-fixada. Contudo, este tipo de swap apresenta risco wrong-way, ou seja, existe uma dependência positiva entre a ação subjacente do swap e a probabilidade de default da companhia, o que precisa ser considerado por um banco ao precificar este tipo de swap. Neste trabalho propomos um modelo para incorporar a dependência entre probabilidades de default e a exposição à contraparte no cálculo do CVA para este tipo de swap. Utilizamos um processo de Cox para modelar o instante de ocorrência de default, dado que a intensidade estocástica de default segue um modelo do tipo CIR, e assumindo que o fator aleatório presente na ação subjacente e que o fator aleatório presente na intensidade de default são dados conjuntamente por uma distribuição normal padrão bivariada. Analisamos o impacto no CVA da incorporação do riscowrong-way para este tipo de swap com diferentes contrapartes, e para diferentes prazos de vencimento e níveis de correlação.

An evolving possibilistic fuzzy modeling approach for value-at-risk estimation

Market risk exposure plays a key role for nancial institutions risk management. A possible measure for this exposure is to evaluate losses likely to incurwhen the price of the portfolio's assets declines using Value-at-Risk (VaR) estimates, one of the most prominent measure of nancial downside market risk. This paper suggests an evolving possibilistic fuzzy modeling approach for VaR estimation. The approach is based on an extension of the possibilistic fuzzy c-means clustering and functional fuzzy rule-based modeling, which employs memberships and typicalities to update clusters and creates new clusters based on a statistical control distance-based criteria. ePFM also uses an utility measure to evaluate the quality of the current cluster structure. Computational experiments consider data of the main global equity market indexes of United States, London, Germany, Spain and Brazil from January 2000 to December 2012 for VaR estimation using ePFM, traditional VaR benchmarks such as Historical Simulation, GARCH, EWMA, and Extreme Value Theory and state of the art evolving approaches. The results show that ePFM is a potential candidate for VaR modeling, with better performance than alternative approaches.

An investigation on parallel, divergent and convergent acetylene dual jet diffusion flames

Results are presented and discussed of an experimental investigation on acetylene turbulent dual jet diffusion flames. The study includes parameters of flames in parallel, divergent and convergent configurations. Tests with two parallel jets with addition of helium in the fuel stream were also performed and analysed. The variation of overall flame length and of other name physical characteristics, such as width, volume and conditions for lifting, are presented as functions of burner tip Reynolds number, jet distance from each other and inclination angle. The effects of diluent concentration in the fuel gas stream are presented for single and two parallel jets. (C) 1999 Elsevier B.V. Ltd.

Measurements of inclusive W plus jets production rates as a function of jet transverse momentum in p(p)over-bar collisions root s=1.96 TeV

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

b-Jet identification in the D0 experiment

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Measurement of three-jet differential cross sections d sigma(3jet)/dM(3jet) in p(p)over-bar collisions at root s=1.96 TeV

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)