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This paper aims to empirically indicate the factors influencing stock liquidity premium (i.e. the relationship between liquidity and stock returns) in one of the leading European emerging markets, namely, the Polish one.

Various firms’ characteristics and market states are analysed as potentially affecting liquidity premiums in the Polish stock market. Stock returns are regressed on liquidity measures and panel models are used. Liquidity premium has been estimated in various subsamples.

The findings vividly contradict the common sense that liquidity premium raises during the periods of stress. Liquidity premium does not increase during bear markets, as investors lengthen the investment horizon when market liquidity decreases. Liquidity premium varies with the firm’s size, book-to-market value and stock risk, but these patterns seem to vanish during a bear market.

This is one of the first empirical papers considering conditional stock liquidity premium in an emerging market. Using a unique methodological design it is presented that liquidity premium in emerging markets behaves differently than in developed markets.

The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis that the valuations of European real estate securities are, in part, determined by the relative liquidity in the companies’ shares.

Six groups are derived for our sample of European listed real estate companies. They are split between the UK and Europe, and then both sets are categorised by liquidity as large, medium or small. These are then tested for market depth, market tightness and difference in valuations over the cycle 2002-2012. Intuitively, it can be expected that the stock market valuation premium for companies with greater liquidity increases post the global financial crisis.

The key discriminating variable that drives companies’ liquidity and valuations is market capitalisation. For both the UK and Europe, the valuation premium of larger companies vs small companies has increased significantly since 2008 (by 20-40 per cent), which can be attributed to the increased value placed on liquidity post GFC.

The sample size is relatively small, and subject to individual company influences on stock market valuation.

The key implications from the findings are the cost and quantum of new equity capital available to companies with superior liquidity, and the possibility of exclusion from portfolios for companies with low liquidity.

Previous studies have focussed on returns for measuring a liquidity premium. This study focusses on relative valuations and how the liquidity premium changes throughout the cycle.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the levels and determinants of net asset value (NAV) premiums/discounts for publicly traded Australian Real Estate Investment Trust (A-REIT) market during the last decade. A-REITs were severely affected by the global financial crisis as S&P/ASX 200 A-REIT index-listed property stocks experienced 47 per cent discount to NAV, on average, in 2008–2009 crisis. Since 2013, A-REIT sector has exhibited a strong recovery from the financial crisis and traded at high premiums to date. Understanding the relationship between pricing in the public and private real estate markets has taken on great importance as A-REITs continue to trade at significant premium to NAV unlike their counterparts in the USA and Europe.

This paper follows a rational approach to explain variations in NAV premiums and explores the company-specific factors such as liquidity, financial leverage, size, stock price volatility and portfolio diversification behind the A-REIT NAV premiums/discounts. The study specifies and estimates a model of cross-sectional and time variation in premiums/discounts to NAV using semi-annual data for a sample of 40 A-REITs over the 2008–2018 period.

The results reveal that A-REIT premiums to NAV can be explained not only by the liquidity benefit of listed property stocks but also positive financial leverage effect. During the past decade, A-REITs have followed an aggressive approach in financing their growth by using borrowed funds to purchase assets as the income from the property offsets the cost of borrowing and the risk that accompanies it. Debt-to-equity ratio has to be considered as an important source of NAV premiums as highly geared A-REITs that favoured debt financing over equity financing traded at significant premiums to NAV of their underlying real estate assets.

The paper includes implications for the REIT market investors. The regression analysis shows that specialty A-REITs with a focus on creative market niches traded at higher premiums compared with other property stocks, especially in the post-GFC recovery period. Specialty REITs are more highly valued by the market than their traditional specialised counterparts (e.g. office and retail REITs), and those pursuing a diversified strategy.

This paper presents an Australian case study as the A-REIT market provides a suitable environment for testing the effect of financial gearing on the REIT premium to NAV. The study provides empirical evidence supporting the importance of debt-to-equity ratio in explaining the variation in A-REIT NAV premiums.

The study attempts to identify the linkages in the term structure of illiquidity and the impact of global and domestic factors on sovereign bonds in emerging Asia. The objective of the study ensues on defining the direction of illiquidity spillover across bonds of varying tenors.

This study explores the joint dynamics of contemporary liquidity risk premia and its time-varying effect on the term structure spectrum using the Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) spillover framework.

A substantial relationship was found to exist between the liquidity of bonds with closer terms to maturity. The macroeconomic environment primarily impacts the liquidity of 10-year bonds, and they spiral down to the subsequent bond liquidity, exhibiting a rippling effect. The authors further show that the direction of liquidity shock transmission is from long- to medium- and thence to short-term bonds. Among the global factors, foreign investments and S & P 500 VIX significantly affect the liquidity of 10-year bonds.

The study has several implications for academicians, policymakers and domestic and global investment professionals. The drivers of liquidity risk and the transmission across the term structure help investors in designing efficient portfolio diversification strategies. The results are relevant for cross-border investors in the valuation of emerging Asian sovereign bonds while deciding on asset allocations and hedging strategies. The monetary regulators strive on a continuous basis to improve the liquidity in sovereign bond markets in order to ensure efficient funding of development activities. This study finds that short-term bonds are more liquid than long-term bonds. Their auction framework with higher series of short-term bond issues helps to provide the required liquidity in the markets.

The term structure of illiquidity is upward sloping, inferring a higher underlying liquidity risk of long-term bonds compared to short-term bonds. This finding suggests that a higher representation of short-term bonds in the auction framework helps to enhance the overall market liquidity.

This study offers insights into the debate on the shape of the term structure of illiquidity and the point of origination of liquidity shocks. Further, the direction of spillover across a wide spectrum of bonds is also demonstrated.

The purpose of this paper is to test the relationship between liquidity in listed real estate markets, company size and geography during different market cycles, specifically pre-crisis (2002-2006) and post-crisis (2010-2014). Further, the study analyses the impact of stock liquidity on stock performance. In a previous study the authors examined the impact of liquidity on the valuation of European real estate shares. The result showed that there is a strong relationship between liquidity, valuation and market capitalisation post the Global Financial Crisis.

The paper studies the linkages between regional market liquidity and company size for 60 listed real estate companies globally and determines the key drivers of company stock market liquidity pre- and post-crisis as well as the impact on stock performance. Analysis of variance is used to test cross-sectional independence in market liquidity combined with the Tukey’s post hoc test. The selected test indicators of liquidity to capture market depth and market tightness are daily stock turnover as percentage of market capitalisation and daily bid-ask spreads.

Findings confirm previous studies that market liquidity factors are correlated globally over time indicating markets interdependence. However, sample groups by company size and geography form independent samples with different sample means, thus specific liquidity levels in each market may be different. First, stock turnover levels have not recovered post-crisis to pre-crisis levels in the majority of markets while spreads have continued moving downward to nearly insignificant levels in line with the rest of the equity market. Second, with regards to stock performance, the European bias previously detected is not apparent in the USA, and there is no evidence of the small cap vs large cap effect of small companies achieving superior returns, although smaller companies have outperformed in Europe and Asia in each of the last three years (2012-2014).

The key implication is that although spread levels for smaller companies are higher, implying a slight risk premium when investing in small companies, this did not manifest into consistent superior stock market returns in the periods studied. In a mature market such as the USA or UK, liquidity levels in terms of stock turnover are higher and spreads are lower thus reducing trading costs, making them more attractive for investors.

This research brings together previous analysis on stock market liquidity and stock performance on a global market level. It further tests the dependence of market liquidity on two key indicators, namely, geography and company size and analyses market changes with respect to liquidity pre- and post-crisis.

Understanding the pricing of real estate equities is a central objective of real estate research. This paper aims to investigate the impact of liquidity on European real estate equity returns, after accounting for well-documented systematic risk factors.

Based on risk factors derived from general equity data, the authors extend the Fama-French time-series regression approach by a liquidity factor, using a pan-European sample of 272 real estate equities.

The empirical results indicate that liquidity is a significant pricing factor in real estate stock returns, even after controlling for market, size and book-to-market factors. In addition, the authors detect that real estate stock returns load predominantly positively on the liquidity risk factor, suggesting that real estate equities tend to behave like illiquid common equities. These findings are underpinned by a series of robustness checks. Running a comparative analysis with alternative factor models, the authors further demonstrate that the liquidity-augmented asset-pricing model is most appropriate for explaining European real estate stock returns.

The inclusion of sentiment and downside risk factors could provide further insights into real estate asset pricing in European capital markets.

This is the first study to examine the role of liquidity as a systematic risk factor in a pan-European setting.

This paper presents an integrated overview of the empirical literature on the impact of all forms of unconventional monetary policy on macroeconomic variables and on markets.

This survey covers the findings concerning portfolio rebalancing, signaling, liquidity, bank lending and confidence channels.

The positive effect of QE announcements on stock and bond prices seems to be unified across studies. A contagion effect from US QE to other emerging markets is identified, while currency devaluation is present in most cases for the country that its central bank adopted such policies. Moreover, impacts of non-conventional practices on GDP, inflation and unemployment are examined. The studies presenting weak instead of strong positive effects on inflation are more, and these studies, also, present weak positive effects on GDP growth.

Based on the large body of research on non-conventional action taking, this is the first survey including effects of each country that adopted quantitative easing (QE) measures and that provides results from every methodology employed in order to estimate unconventional practices' impacts.

This study aims to compare the fundamental indexation (FI) portfolio vis-à-vis the cap-weighted index (CWI). It also explored the return-generating attributes of the FI portfolios.

This study extracted relevant data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s Prowess database from March 1996 to March 2017 from a sample of National Stock Exchange (NSE) 500 companies. The FI portfolios were constructed with First_50 and Next_50 stocks using the latest and five years of trailing average aggregations. Further, the regression technique was used to identify the return-generating attributes of FI portfolios.

It was found that the FI portfolios based on First_50 and Next_50 stocks outperformed the CWI (i.e. NSE_First_50 and NSE_Next_50) in the Indian capital market, and between the two, the FI portfolios based on Next_50 stocks were superior to the FI portfolios based on First_50 stocks. The cross-sectional superiority of FI portfolios is obvious if they are sorted according to four fundamentals, namely, total income, sales, operating cash flows and profit before depreciation interest tax and amortisation. The return-generating process of FI portfolios is well-explained by market premium followed by value premium and investment premium.

This study may enable portfolio managers and investors to measure FI portfolios’ superiority in the Indian capital market and identify the return-generating attributes of FI portfolios so that the loadings can be switched amongst different priced factors for higher yield. Further, this study extends the FI literature, providing evidence from one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

To the best of the knowledge, this is amongst the first few studies to explore the performance of FI portfolios vis-à-vis CWIs in India, and to use Fama and French (2015) asset pricing models to understand the return-generating attributes of FI portfolios. It is also novel in the sense that it considers the FI portfolios for a longer duration, predating 1997 and coinciding with the inception of CWIs, namely, NSE_First_50 (inception: 1995) and NSE_Next_50 (inception: 1996), reducing the apprehensions of data-snooping biases.

This study aims to examine the hypothesis that the effect of insurer risks on profitability is conditional on regulation, using two main regulatory directives in the Ghanaian insurance market as a case study.

This study used the robust ordinary least square and random effect techniques in a panel data of 30 insurers from 2009 to 2015 to test the research hypothesis.

The results suggest that regulations on no credit premium and required capital have insignificant effects on profitability of insurers. On the contrary, this study documents evidence that both policies mitigate the effect of underwriting risk on profitability and suggests that regulations significantly mitigate the negative effect of underwriting risk to improve profitability.

The finding suggests that policymakers and regulators must continue to initiate, design and model regulations such that they help tame risk to improve the performance of insurers in Ghana.

This study provides first-time evidence on the role of regulations in controlling risks in a developing insurance market.

The risk-return relationship of real estate equities is of particular interest for investors, practitioners and researchers. The purpose of this paper is to examine, in an asset pricing framework, whether the systematic risk factors play a significantly different role in explaining the returns of listed real estate companies, compared to general equities.

Running the difference test of the Fama-French three-factor and the liquidity-augmented asset pricing model, the authors analyze the effect of the systematic risk factors related to market, size, BE/ME and liquidity in a time-series setting over the period July 1992 to June 2012. By applying the propensity score matching (PSM) algorithm, the authors bypass the “curse of dimensionality” of traditional matching techniques and identify a comparable control sample of general equities, in terms of the relevant firm characteristics of size, BE/ME and liquidity.

The empirical results indicate that European real estate equity returns load significantly differently on the size, value and liquidity factor, while the influence of the market factor seems to be equivalent. In addition, the authors find an economically and statistically significant underperformance of European real estate equities, after accounting for the diverging role of systematic risk factors. Running the conditional time-series regression, the authors further reveal that these findings are predominately caused by the divergent risk-return behavior of real estate equities in economic downturns.

Due to the diverging role of the systematic risk factors in pricing real estate equities, the authors provide evidence of potential diversification benefits for investors and portfolio managers.

This is the first real estate asset pricing study to dissect the unique risk-return relationship of real estate equities by employing propensity score matching.