Dr Shaker Ahmed

We analyze the impact of the 2024 U.S. presidential election outcome on equity markets using an event study methodology. The results indicate significant abnormal returns in U.S. equities during the immediate post-election trading session, following Donald Trump's confirmed victory. However, this initial surge was followed by a modest reversal, suggesting fluctuating investor sentiment over time. Cross-sectional firm-level analysis shows that small-cap equities experienced the most notable positive abnormal returns. Sectoral analysis reveals varied responses: the energy sector saw substantial gains, likely due to anticipated regulatory shifts, while industries like chemicals had more moderate post-event reactions. These findings underscore the complex and varied market responses to significant political developments.

In this chapter, we present a descriptive analysis of executive compensation in U.S. banks over the period 1992-2018. Specifically, using detailed data on the compensation of the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of the S&P 1500 banks, we examine the development trends in the level and structure of bank CEO compensation over time. Moreover, we also assess differences in CEO compensation levels and structures across banking organizations with different types of business models. Our key findings can be summarized as follows: (1) The level of CEO total compensation varies considerably over time. (2) The total compensation of bank CEOs decreased substantially around the global financial crisis and has not yet exceeded the pre-crisis levels despite the systematic increase over the last decade. (3) Bonuses and other types of incentive compensation items comprise a vast proportion of bank CEO compensation. (4) The base salary of bank CEOs has remained relatively constant over time. (5) Both the level and the composition of CEO compensation differ across bank types with the CEOs of investment banks having the highest pay and the highest proportion of performance-based compensation items after controlling for bank size, capital ratio, and financial performance. (6) The structure of bank CEOs' incentive compensation has largely shifted from options toward restricted stock in the aftermath of the financial crisis. This chapter presents a descriptive analysis of executive compensation in US banks over the period 1992-2018. The Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of large US banks are among the highest-paid individuals in the economy. Kaplan and Rauh document that bank CEOs are at the very top end of the income distribution, while the findings of Philippon and Reshef indicate that the CEOs of financial institutions earn a 250% premium relative to CEOs in other industries. In addition to the potential role of bank CEO compensation in the recent financial crisis, executive compensation in the banking industry has important implications for the overall financial stability and the resiliency of the financial system. While regional banks tend to operate in limited geographic regions, diversified banks are larger and operate nationwide and provide a range of financial services along with basic retail banking and lending activities. In contrast, thrift and mortgage banks provide mortgage and mortgage-related services.

This paper studies simple moving average trading strategies employing daily price data on the eleven most-traded cryptocurrencies in the 2016-2018 period. Our results indicate a variable moving average strategy is successful when using the 20 days moving average trading strategy. Specifically, excluding Bitcoin the technical trading rule generates an excess return of 8.76% p.a. after controlling for the average market return. Our results suggest that cryptocurrency markets are inefficient.

This paper investigates the effect of the Russia-Ukraine crisis on the Australian stock market. Using the event study methodology, we find significantly negative abnormal returns on the event date (i.e., the first trading day after Russia recognized the two Ukrainian states as autonomous regions) in the Australian stock market. However, this negative stock market reaction mostly disappeared in the post-event period. We also find that small and medium-sized firms were adversely affected during the pre-event and event periods. Interestingly, the magnitude and the direction of the abnormal returns vary across industries. We also find that high-growth, illiquid and export-oriented firms are more exposed to the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

This paper uses Chief Executive Officer (CEO) facial features to examine the association between CEO masculinity and bank risk-taking. Given that high facial width-to-height ratio has been linked to high testosterone levels and masculine behavioral traits such as increased risk tolerance, aggression, and sensation seeking, we postulate a positive relationship between CEO facial masculinity and bank risk-taking. Consistent with this prediction, we document that banks led by CEOs with more masculine facial features are associated with more volatile stock returns and higher levels of idiosyncratic risk.

In this paper, we show that extreme returns can predict future returns in the Turkish stock market. We find that extreme return (high MAX) generating stocks show a lower performance in the next month in this market. More explicitly, there is a strong negative relationship between the firm's maximum (MAX) daily returns over the previous month and its succeeding stock returns. Our results are robust in both firm-level cross-sectional, and portfolio-level analysis.

This paper examines the effect of facial attractiveness on the compensation of bank Chief Exec-utive Officers (CEOs). Consistent with the so-called beauty premium hypothesis, we document that good looks pay off for bank CEOs. Specifically, by utilizing machine learning to assess the facial appearance of the CEOs of large U.S. banks, we find that CEO facial attractiveness is positively associated with the annual total compensation and the discretionary, performance -based components of compensation. The total compensation of above-average looking bank CEOs is about 24% higher than the compensation of CEOs with below-average looks after con-trolling for various CEO-specific and bank-specific attributes that are known to affect executive compensation. Furthermore, our results indicate that facial attractiveness is weakly positively related to the annual base salary while being unrelated to the pay-performance and pay-risk sensitivities of bank CEO compensation. Overall, our empirical findings provide strong evi-dence for the existence of a beauty premium in the executive labor market.

This paper studies simple moving average trading strategies employing daily price data on the ten most-traded cryptocurrencies that exhibit the ‘privacy function’. Investigating the 2016–2018 period, our results indicate a variable moving average strategy is successful only when applied to Dash generating returns of 14.6%−18.25% p.a. in excess of the simple buy-and-hold benchmark strategy. However, when applying our technical trading rules to the entire set of ten privacy coins shows that, on an aggregate level, simple technical trading rules do not generate positive returns in excess of a buy-and-hold strategy.

Firms develop and deploy selling capability to create and sustain a competitive advantage. Previous studies have focused predominantly on static, input-based selling capability, paying little attention to dynamic, efficiency-focused selling capability. This treatise reconceptualizes selling capability from a dynamic and efficiency (input-output) perspective and investigates the effect of selling capability on firm value with the contingent role of internal [i.e. relative strategic emphasis (SE)] and external (i.e. market volatility and technological volatility) factors. Using data from 341 US-based manufacturing and service firms over the period 2014-2020 and an endogeneity-robust dynamic estimation technique, the authors find that selling capability positively affects firm value, and firms with a relative SE on value appropriation (i.e. advertising) as opposed to value creation (i.e. R&D) reap more rewards from selling capability. That is, relative SE positively moderates the nexus between selling capability and firm value. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the interactive effect of selling capability and relative SE is weaker when an industry experiences higher market volatility but stronger when technological volatility is higher. Overall, this study demonstrates that a firm's selling capability should be managed dynamically in light of its (internal) relative SE and (external) environmental conditions. The results are robust to several additional sensitivity analyses.

We examine the significance of extreme positive returns of the previous month (MAX) as a return predictor in the Finnish stock market. We show that high fear months, i.e., months associated with the investor's high expectation for future volatility, are accompanying with low MAX effect implying that investors reluctant to gamble in high MAX stocks when they have high expectation for future volatility. (C) 2019 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We examine the effect of the Russia-Ukraine crisis on the European stock markets. Because of increased political uncertainty, geographic proximity and the ramifications of the fresh sanctions imposed on Russia, the European stock markets tended to react negatively to this crisis. We find that on 21 February 2022, when Russia recognized two Ukrainian states as autonomous regions, European stocks incurred a significant negative abnormal return. Moreover, the negative stock price reactions continued in the post-event period. The magnitude of the stock price reactions to this crisis exhibits considerable variation across industries, countries and size of the company.