Stefan Palan founding member of the G53 Financial Literacy and Personal Finance Research Network

Platform researcher Stefan Palan was recently asked to become a founding member of the G53 Financial Literacy and Personal Finance Research Network (G53 Network). Founded by Annamaria Lusardi, the Director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC) and a pioneer in financial literacy research, the G53 network aims to promote research into financial literacy and personal finance along the lines of - but in a more globalized manner than - an NBER research program. The G53 network is named after the JEL code for research into financial literacy and was - fittingly - started with 53 researchers.

New Paper on Market Reactions to Donald Trump’s Twitter News

The former US President Donald Trump has revolutionized the way in which top politicians communicate political opinions or decisions. Instead of turning to the public via official press conferences or the intermediary media, he directly communicated with the public via the microblogging platform Twitter throughout his presidency. Trump regularly  addressed individual companies in his tweets.

In a new paper, platform members Tobias Machus, Roland Mestel and Erik Theissen analyze how these tweets affected the stocks of the firms addressed in the tweets. Unlike previous papers, they use intraday (minute-by-minute) data in addition to daily data in order to uncover causal effects of the tweets on prices and trading activity. They find that the tweets caused increased trading activity but did not have lasting effects on stock prices. They also find evidence of abnormal returns, increased trading volume and increased investor attention already before the tweets. This finding is consistent with Donald Trump’s tweets not providing new information but rather being comments on events that happened, and already attracted investor attention, before the tweet.

The paper was presented at the FiRe Research Day in June 2020 and has recently been accepted for publication in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance.

Machus, T., Mestel, R., Theissen, E. , 2022. "Heroes, just for one day: The impact of Donald Trump’s tweets on stock prices", Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Vol. 33, 100594. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2021.100594

Successful online workshop of the Austrian Working Group on Banking and Finance

The Institute of Banking and Finance organized the 36th workshop of the Austrian Working Group on Banking and Finance (AWG) on November 26 and 27, 2021. Initially scheduled to be held in Graz, the COVID-19 pandemic once again necessitated an online format. Despite the virtual meeting, the workshop was a great success. With a total of 30 scheduled presentations and 49 participants, the workshop was one of the most successful yet.

The organizers wish to thank all participants and invite them to next year's workshop in Klagenfurt.

Martin Rauch joins research platform

Martin Rauch is a university assistant and PhD student at the Institute of Finance. His doctoral thesis deals with Decentralized Exchanges (DEX). A relatively new phenomenon enabled by blockchain technology and smart contracts, DEXs are marketplaces where traders can exchange crypto assets without relying on intermediaries.

The focus of Martin’s thesis lies on the group of liquidity providers, who, by depositing their assets into a smart contract against which other market participants can subsequently conduct trades, play a crucial role in the functioning of DEXs.

Felix Weißensteiner joins research platform

Felix Weißensteiner is a university assistant and PhD student at the Institute of Finance under the supervision of Prof. Edwin Fischer. His thesis focuses on analyzing commodity markets, particularly the electricity wholesale market and its pricing mechanisms, and the emerging green hydrogen market. Felix will investigate the cost-dynamics of the green hydrogen market and the trade-offs involved in make-or-buy decisions. His goal is to contribute to the understanding of commodity markets and provide valuable insights for promoting sustainable and efficient resource allocation.

Robert Merl successfully defends PhD

Today Robert Merl successfully defended his PhD thesis "Insider Trading Regulation and Short Selling".  Robert's doctoral studies focused on the role of insider trading regulation in financial markets.

Robert's first published paper reviews the literature of experimental studies on insider trading and its regulation (Merl, R., Forthcoming. "Literature review of experimental asset markets with insiders", Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 100596). In his second paper, Robert studies the interaction between insider trading, short-selling and regulation prohibiting both of these activities (Merl, R., Stöckl, T., Palan, S., 2021. "Insider trading regulation and shorting constraints. Evaluating the joint effects of two market interventions.", SSRN discussion paper #3890173). In his third paper, titled "Insider trading regulation and trader migration", Robert studies the effects of regulation banning informed trading in one market when traders can migrate to another market that trades the same asset. A working paper version of this third paper is currently being prepared.

We congratulate Robert on his achievement and wish him all the best for his future!

New review paper on insider trading experiments

Insider trading is a widely researched topic with many papers deploying theoretical models, undertaking empirical work and conducting experiments. To help keep an overview over this topic is the aim of the paper "Literature Review of Experimental Asset Markets with In- siders.".

With this paper, platform member Robert Merl provides an exhaustive overview of the results from experimental economics on asset markets with asymmetrically informed participants. The main areas researched so far experimentally with insiders are the comparison of theoretical models, the market structure, the information structure, the price e fficiency, the information dissemination, the trading behaviour, the liquidity, the profi ts, the ethics, the market observers and the detection of insiders.

The paper has been published today: Merl, R. 2021. "Literature review of experimental asset markets with insiders". Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Vol. 33, 100596 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2021.100596 

FiRe launches new event series

FiRe conducted the first event in a new series on October 20, 2021: the "FiRe Forum". More than 240 people attended this panel discussion, which was held in German and entitled "Corona-Pandemie und die Mutation der Bankwirtschaft" (“Corona pandemic and the mutation of the banking sector”). Andrea Schertler welcomed Markus Schwaiger, Director of the Department for Financial Stability and the Supervision of Less Significant Institutions at the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian National Bank), Gerda Holzinger-Burgstaller, Chairwoman of the Management Board of Erste Bank Österreich, and Stefan Pichler, Professor at the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

The panelists reflected on the pandemic and agreed that the banking industry was more an anchor of stability during the pandemic than a liability, and that it played an important role in sustaining economic activity through its branch infrastructure. Banks could fulfil this role because banking sector resilience improved substantially after the Global Financial Crisis. For the coming years, the panelists see digitalization, such as Big Data applications, FinTech competition and regulatory uncertainties, as key issues. Furthermore, the low interest rate environment, the increasing need to comply with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria, and the aftermath of the Corona pandemic will put further pressure on profitability and cost efficiency.

Josef Fink completes PhD with top grade

Today Josef Fink completed his doctoral studies with a dissertation defense that the committee graded "Sehr gut", the top grade in the Austrian grading system. Josef's dissertation, titled "Experiments on the Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift", was also graded "Sehr gut". In its core, it is made up of three papers studying the phenomenon of stock prices drifting in the direction of the surprise component of a company's announced earnings for up to four quarters following the initial announcement.

In his first paper, titled "A Review of the Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift" and published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Josef provides the most comprehensive (by a wide margin) review  of the literature on the PEAD phenomenon to date. In his second paper, titled "Earnings Autocorrelation and the Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift", Josef studies the role of autocorrelation in the earnings process on the drift. In his third paper, titled "Trading Frictions and the Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift", Josef investigates the role of frictions (i.e., a short-selling ban and transaction fees) on the drift.

We congratulate Josef and express our pride of him for this achievement!

Roland Mestel publishes comment in "Die Presse"

Roland Mestel discusses the current rally in cryptocurrency prices in a guest comment in "Die Presse".

New Paper on Measuring Liquidity of Cryptocurrency Markets

The growing importance of bitcoin for payments and investments is dependent on an efficient exchange of bitcoin for other currencies on cryptocurrency exchanges. The number of exchanges has exploded, making it difficult for investors to select an exchange for trading and hedging. While trading has become relatively frequent in cryptocurrencies the liquidity of these markets is difficult to determine.

In this paper, platform members Alexander Brauneis, Roland Mestel and Erik Theissen as well as their co-author Ryan Riordan from Queen’s University, investigate the efficacy of low-frequency transaction based liquidity measures to describe actual (high-frequency) liquidity. The authors show that the Corwin and Schultz (2012) and Abdi and Ranaldo (2017) estimators outperform other measures in describing time-series variations, irrespective of the observation frequency, trading venue, high-frequency liquidity benchmark, and cryptocurrency. Both measures perform well during high and low return, volatility and volume periods. The Kyle and Obizhaeva (2016) estimator and the Amihud (2002) illiquidity ratio outperform when estimating liquidity levels. These two estimators also reliably identify liquidity differences between trading venues. Overall, the results suggest that there is not yet a universally best measure but there are reasonably good low-frequency measures.

The paper was presented at the FiRe Research Day in December 2019 and has recently been accepted for publication in The Journal of Banking and Finance.

Brauneis, A., Mestel, R., Riordan, R., Theissen, E. (2021). How to measure the liquidity of cryptocurrency markets?, Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 124, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbankfin.2020.106041

Florian Stöckler joins research platform

Florian Stöckler recently joined the research platform after becoming a PhD student at the Institute of Banking and Finance under the supervision of Andrea Schertler.

Florian's educational background is in economics and he previously worked as a data analyst at the University of Graz.

Florian's research interests include predictive modeling and exploratory data analysis. In his PhD thesis, he intends to focus on text mining models and on studying how text information may improve financial decision making.

Markus Höfler joins research platform

Markus Höfler recently joined the research platform as a PhD student under the supervision of Andrea Schertler. Markus previously completed his Master in Business Administration also at the University of Graz. Besides his doctoral studies, Markus works in the trade finance area of a private company in the metals industry.

In his doctoral thesis, Markus plans to study prices of precious and industrial metals in crisis periods. In particular, he intends to research these metals' price determinants and bond hedging properties as well as the existence of feedback trading.