Graduation Year
2020
Date of Submission
12-2019
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Economics
Reader 1
Professor Murat Binay, Ph.D.
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
Now that U.S. equity investments allocated towards tracking indexes have surpassed that of active managers, discussions regarding the implications of passive investments on financial markets have intensified. Using the passive ownership discontinuity of the Russell 1000 and Russell 2000 Indices to isolate the effects of passive ownership on stock prices, this paper answers whether or not the evidence of downward sloping demand curves found in prior literature still exists in more recent samples. As the first to apply the two-stage least squares (2SLS) methodology of Appel, Gormley, and Keim (2018) to predict abnormal returns adjacent to the Russell reconstitution event, my results suggest that the percent of a firm’s stock owned by passive investors is positively correlated with abnormal returns surrounding the annual reconstitution. Additionally, I find evidence that abnormal returns persist over multiple months post-reconstitution. The lack of significant abnormal returns found three months after reconstitution supports the claim that price effects are due to forced buying related to index matching.
Recommended Citation
Byrd, Dylan, "It’s All Downhill from Here: Evidence Supporting Downward Sloping Demand Curves for Stocks near the Russell 1000/2000 Cut-off" (2020). CMC Senior Theses. 2303.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2303
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.
