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Essays on bond exchange-traded funds

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Date Issued:
2011
Summary:
This dissertation investigates two fundamental questions related to how well exchange-traded funds that hold portfolios of fixed-income assets (bond ETFs) proxy for their underlying portfolios. The first question involves price/net-asset-value (NAV) mean-reversion asymmetries and the effectiveness of the arbitrage mechanism of bond ETFs. Methodologically, to answer the first question I focus on a time-series analysis. The second question involves the degree to which average returns of bond ETF shares respond to changes in factors that have been found to drive average returns of bond portfolios. To answer this question I shift the focus of the analysis to a cross-section asset pricing test. In other words, do bond ETF share prices track the value of their underlying assets, and are they priced by investors like bonds in the cross-section? The first essay concludes that bond ETF shares exhibit mean-reversion asymmetries when price and NAV diverge, along persistent small premiums. These premiums appear to reflect the added value that bond ETFs bring to the fixed-income asset market through smaller trading increments, greater liquidity, and the ability to buy on margin and sell short. The second essay concludes that market, bond-specific, and firm-specific risk factors can help to explain the variation in U.S. bond ETF average returns, but only size seems to be priced in the cross-section of expected returns. This is not surprising as the sample used in the asset pricing tests is limited to the period 2007-2010, which corresponds to the "great recession", and size has been interpreted in the asset pricing literature as a state variable that proxies for financial distress and is highly dependent on the phase of the real business cycle.
Title: Essays on bond exchange-traded funds.
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Name(s): Evans, Charles W.
College of Business
Department of Finance
Type of Resource: text
Genre: Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation
Date Issued: 2011
Publisher: Florida Atlantic University
Physical Form: electronic
Extent: ix, 105 p. : ill. (some col.)
Language(s): English
Summary: This dissertation investigates two fundamental questions related to how well exchange-traded funds that hold portfolios of fixed-income assets (bond ETFs) proxy for their underlying portfolios. The first question involves price/net-asset-value (NAV) mean-reversion asymmetries and the effectiveness of the arbitrage mechanism of bond ETFs. Methodologically, to answer the first question I focus on a time-series analysis. The second question involves the degree to which average returns of bond ETF shares respond to changes in factors that have been found to drive average returns of bond portfolios. To answer this question I shift the focus of the analysis to a cross-section asset pricing test. In other words, do bond ETF share prices track the value of their underlying assets, and are they priced by investors like bonds in the cross-section? The first essay concludes that bond ETF shares exhibit mean-reversion asymmetries when price and NAV diverge, along persistent small premiums. These premiums appear to reflect the added value that bond ETFs bring to the fixed-income asset market through smaller trading increments, greater liquidity, and the ability to buy on margin and sell short. The second essay concludes that market, bond-specific, and firm-specific risk factors can help to explain the variation in U.S. bond ETF average returns, but only size seems to be priced in the cross-section of expected returns. This is not surprising as the sample used in the asset pricing tests is limited to the period 2007-2010, which corresponds to the "great recession", and size has been interpreted in the asset pricing literature as a state variable that proxies for financial distress and is highly dependent on the phase of the real business cycle.
Summary: The two essays together suggest that bond ETFs can be used in trading strategies based on taking long and short positions in fixed-income assets, especially when trading in portfolios of fixed-income assets directly is not feasible.
Identifier: 749953911 (oclc), 3175017 (digitool), FADT3175017 (IID), fau:3698 (fedora)
Note(s): by Charles W. Evans.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011.
Includes bibliography.
Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Subject(s): Exchange traded funds
Portfolio management
Hedge funds
Stock index futures
Persistent Link to This Record: http://purl.flvc.org/FAU/3175017
Use and Reproduction: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Host Institution: FAU