IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedgfe/2014-106.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are Concerns About Leveraged ETFs Overblown?

Author

Listed:

Abstract

Leveraged and inverse exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have been heavily criticized for exacerbating volatility in financial markets because it is thought that they mechanically rebalance their portfolios in the same direction as contemporaneous returns. We argue that these criticisms are likely exaggerated because they ignore the effects of capital flows on ETF rebalancing demand. Empirically, we find that capital flows substantially reduce the need for ETFs to rebalance when returns are large in magnitude and, therefore, mitigate the potential for these products to amplify volatility. We also show theoretically that flows can completely eliminate ETF rebalancing in the limit.

Suggested Citation

  • Ivan T. Ivanov & Stephen L. Lenkey, 2014. "Are Concerns About Leveraged ETFs Overblown?," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2014-106, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2014-106
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2014/files/2014106pap.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Itzhak Ben‐David & Francesco Franzoni & Rabih Moussawi, 2018. "Do ETFs Increase Volatility?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 73(6), pages 2471-2535, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Baumann, Michael Heinrich & Herz, Bernhard & Baumann, Michaela, 2018. "Exchange-traded Funds, Investment Strategies, and Financial Stability," VfS Annual Conference 2018 (Freiburg, Breisgau): Digital Economy 181542, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    2. Mark Egan & Alexander MacKay & Hanbin Yang, 2022. "Recovering Investor Expectations from Demand for Index Funds [American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) Investor Sentiment Survey]," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 89(5), pages 2559-2599.
    3. DeVault, Luke & Turtle, H.J. & Wang, Kainan, 2021. "Blessing or curse? Institutional investment in leveraged ETFs," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    4. Zhongjin Lu & Zhongling Qin, 2021. "Leveraged Funds and the Shadow Cost of Leverage Constraints," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(3), pages 1295-1338, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kiran Paudel & Atsuyuki Naka, 2023. "Effects of size on the exchange-traded funds performance," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 24(6), pages 474-484, October.
    2. Xu, Liao & Xu, Lu & Zhao, Jing & Zhao, Yang, 2020. "Information-based trading and information propagation: Evidence from the exchange traded fund market," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    3. Agarwal, Vikas & Hanouna, Paul & Moussawi, Rabih & Stahel, Christof W., 2021. "Do ETFs increase the commonality in liquidity of underlying stocks?," CFR Working Papers 21-04, University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR).
    4. Xu, Liao & Pu, Wenyan, 2022. "ETFs, arbitrage activity, and stock market efficiency: Evidence from Chinese CSI 300 ETFs," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 1-9.
    5. Hu, Gang & Jo, Koren M. & Wang, Yi Alex & Xie, Jing, 2018. "Institutional trading and Abel Noser data," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 143-167.
    6. Damien Kunjal, 2022. "Evaluating the Liquidity Response of South African Exchange-Traded Funds to Country Risk Effects," Economies, MDPI, vol. 10(6), pages 1-20, June.
    7. Dannhauser, Caitlin D., 2017. "The impact of innovation: Evidence from corporate bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs)," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 125(3), pages 537-560.
    8. Luca J. Liebi, 2020. "The effect of ETFs on financial markets: a literature review," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 34(2), pages 165-178, June.
    9. Broman, Markus S., 2020. "Local demand shocks, excess comovement and return predictability," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).
    10. Pástor, Luboš & Koont, Naz & , & Zeng, Yao, 2022. "Steering a Ship in Illiquid Waters: Active Management of Passive Funds," CEPR Discussion Papers 17283, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    11. Tomas Williams, 2018. "Capital Inflows, Sovereign Debt and Bank Lending: Micro-Evidence from an Emerging Market," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 31(12), pages 4958-4994.
    12. Yousefi, Hamed & Najand, Mohammad, 2022. "Geographical diversification using ETFs: Multinational evidence from COVID-19 pandemic," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    13. Hurlin, Christophe & Iseli, Grégoire & Pérignon, Christophe & Yeung, Stanley, 2019. "The counterparty risk exposure of ETF investors," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 215-230.
    14. Itzhak Ben-David & Francesco A. Franzoni & Rabih Moussawi, 2019. "An Improved Method to Predict Assignment of Stocks into Russell Indexes," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 19-56, Swiss Finance Institute.
    15. Mariia Kosar & Sergei Mikhalishchev, 2022. "Inattentive Price Discovery in ETFs," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp735, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    16. Yutaka Kurihara & Shinichiro Maeda & Akio Fukushima, 2021. "Have the Purchases of ETF Raised Stock Prices? Recent Japanese Case," Bulletin of Applied Economics, Risk Market Journals, vol. 8(1), pages 109-119.
    17. Damien Kunjal & Faeezah Peerbhai & Paul-Francois Muzindutsi, 2021. "The performance of South African exchange traded funds under changing market conditions," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 22(5), pages 350-359, September.
    18. Atanasova, Christina & Weisskopf, Jean-Philippe, 2020. "The price of international equity ETFs: The role of relative liquidity," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    19. Anders Merrild Posselt, 2022. "Dynamics in the VIX complex," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(9), pages 1665-1687, September.
    20. Hans K. Hvide & Tom G. Meling & Magne Mogstad & Ola L. Vestad, 2021. "Broadband internet and the stock market investments of individual investors," Discussion Papers 946, Statistics Norway, Research Department.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Leveraged ETFs; volatility;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2014-106. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.