Unraveling behavioral biases in decision making: A study of Nepalese investors

Financial Reynolds number works as a proxy for volatility in stock markets. This piece of work helps to identify the predictability and herd behavior embedded in the financial Reynolds number (time series) series for both CNX Nifty Regular and CNX Nifty High Frequency Trading domains. Hurst exponent and fractal dimension have been used to carry out this work. Results confirm conclusive evidence of predictability and herd behavior for both the indices. However, it has been observed that CNX Nifty High Frequency Trading domain (represented by its corresponding financial Reynolds number) is more predictable and has traces of significant herd behavior. The pattern of the predictability has been found to follow a quadratic equation.

This study examines the association between tax aggressiveness and overconfidence in 277 Brazilian stock market listed companies from 2010 to 2017, with the supposition (based on optimal capital ownership structure theory) that the greater a manager’s overconfidence, the more aggressive the company’s tax decisions. Overconfidence is measured in an innovative way in which normalizing excess acquisitions and excess investments using the company’s market value and then combining these two variables with indebtedness to capture, more directly, the possible effects of overconfidence on the corporation’s operations. Tax aggressiveness is computed using a tax burden on earnings and value-added. The variables included in the model were obtained from data contained in the selected companies’ financial statements. Data analysis was performed by multiple linear regression. The parameters used combined and fixed effects methods to identify an association between tax aggressiveness and overconfidence. Data related to corporate governance, CEO’s characteristics, and capital concentration were used as control variables. The study’s main finding does not show any significant relationship between fiscal aggressiveness and overconfidence; however, they did show a significant association with tax aggressiveness, the company’s size, the return on shares, and the education level of the CEO. An interesting finding of the robustness tests is the stationarity of tax aggressiveness, which could partially explain the non-significance of the main finding.

The authors adopt an event study method and empirically investigate the performance of a beta momentum strategy (long in past winners of small beta and short in past losers of large beta) after extreme market movements in 20 countries. The researchers find that the beta momentum strategy yields material abnormal returns after controlling for return factors of size (SMB), book-to-market (HML) and momentum (UMD). The results are consistent for both extreme market UP days or DOWN days and regardless of whether the extreme market movements are identified by three percent or two percent cut-off points. In addition, the results based on the beta momentum strategy are more consistent than those of conventional momentum and betting against beta (BAB) strategies over different test windows from (0, +1) days to (0, +90). Finally, the abnormal returns based on momentum, BAB, and our beta momentum strategies are statistically insignificant for the Asian and Australian subsamples, whereas the results are significant for the European and North American samples.