This study examines the volatility of nine leading cryptocurrencies by market capitalization—Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Stellar, Litecoin, TRON, Cardano, and IOTA-by using a Bayesian Stochastic Volatility (SV) model and several GARCH models. We find that when we deal with extremely volatile financial data, such as cryptocurrencies, the SV model performs better than the GARCH family models. Moreover, the forecasting errors of the SV model, compared with the GARCH models, tend to be more accurate as forecast time horizons are longer. This deepens our insight into volatility forecast models in the complex market of cryptocurrencies.

Exploring dependence structures between financial time series has been important within a wide range of applications. The main aim of this paper is to examine dependence relationships among five well-known cryptocurrencies—Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and Stella—by a copula directional dependence (CDD). By employing a neural network autoregression model to avoid the serial dependence in each individual cryptocurrency, we generate residuals of the fitted models with time series of daily log-returns in percentage of the five cryptocurrencies and then we apply a Gaussian copula marginal beta regression model to the residuals to explore the CDD. The results show that the CDD from Bitcoin to Litecoin is highest among all ordered directional dependencies and the CDDs from Ethereum to the other four cryptocurrencies are relatively higher than the CDDs to Ethereum from those cryptocurrencies. This finding implies that the return shocks of Bitcoin have the most effect on Litecoin and the return shocks of Ethereum relatively influence the shocks on the other four cryptocurrencies instead of being affected by them. This allows investors to build the market-timing strategies by observing the directional flow of return shocks among cryptocurrencies.

We employed linear and nonlinear error correction models (ECMs) to predict the log returns of Bitcoin (BTC). The linear ECM is the best model for predicting BTC compared to the neural network and autoregressive models in terms of RMSE, MAE, and MAPE. Using a linear ECM, we are able to understand how BTC is affected by other coins. In addition, we performed Granger-causality tests on fourteen cryptocurrencies.

Motivated by growing attention to the agency problems of institutional investors, along with recent changes that have identified real estate investment trusts (REITs) as a separate industry segment, this study investigates the impacts of institutional ownership on the firm value of hotel REITs. Hotel REITs provide unique regulatory and operational settings in which it is appropriate to investigate the potential adverse consequences of institutional investments on firm value. This study performs additional analyses using non-REIT hotel corporations (hotel C-corporations) for comparison. After testing pooled ordinary least squares, fixed and random effects, and two-stage least squares in quadratic models, the results of the random effects models are found to be valid and are thus adopted to examine the hypothesized relationship. The analysis showed a U-shaped relationship between institutional ownership and firm value (as measured using Tobin’s q) but a dominantly negative relationship in the majority of observations, whereas no significant relationship is found for hotel C-corporations.

This paper examines the effect of board characteristics, especially board independence, on firm performance from a dynamic perspective through copula-based quantile regression approaches, which allow us to focus on changes at different points in the distribution of board characteristics. We find that the effect of board independence on Tobin’s Q, a proxy of firm value, is negatively associated with firm value, using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. This negative effect using the conditional mean of the firm value does not hold across the conditional quantiles of the distribution of Tobin’s Q, and this finding is still held under both the linear and the nonlinear quantile regressions. We even lessen the assumption of distributions of multivariate board variables by employing parametric copula-based quantile regressions as well as nonparametric ones. The results support our findings. Our results suggest that estimating the quantile effect of board variables on firm value can provide more meaningful insight than just examining the conditional mean effect.

The study of a causal interpretation of board and firm characteristics, that is, a hidden dependence relationship on the causal inference among board and firm characteristics, is an important but unaddressed issue in the corporate governance literature. Using diverse advanced statistical methods and focusing on Tobin’s Q, we find that (i) not all board variables previously found to be significant are “robust” to latent variable data analysis, and (ii) those variables that are consistently significant differ markedly in latent structural equation analysis. Our analyses provide researchers interested in board issues with an important caveat: Focusing on the dependence structure of available board variables affected by latent factors may introduce a new horizon in corporate finance.