Managers’ use of language in corrupt firms’ financial disclosures: Evidence from FCPA violators

This paper explores management’s use of language in financial disclosures of corrupt firms by looking at a sample of firms that have been prosecuted for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). We find that the management of FCPA violators use more negative, less litigious, more complex and less conservative language when disclosing financials than non‐violators. The language effect prior to an FCPA prosecution is driven by firms with low corporate governance performance. By contrast, firms with high corporate governance use less complex and more conservative language before an FCPA prosecution than firms with low corporate governance performance. Furthermore, we find that after an FCPA prosecution the language becomes less litigious and complex than before the FCPA litigation.     

Quality investing in Asian stock markets

We examine two quality investing strategies using gross profitability (GP) or FSCORE, respectively, over the period of 2000–2016 in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan stock markets. We find that the high-quality stocks generally earn positive returns in these markets. Both FSCORE and GP are significantly positively associated with subsequent stock returns in the cross-sectional regressions. We also find that financial institutions as sophisticated investor concern about stock quality. The actively managed institutions buy significantly more high-quality stocks than low-quality stocks in each of five Asian markets. The trading pattern is not significant in passively managed institutions.     

Dynamic Links Between Unexpected Exchange Rate Variation, Prices, and International Trade

This paper investigates dynamic interrelations between exchange rate uncertainty, international trade, and trading competitiveness in prices, using UK data. The empirical results derived from vector autoregressive (VAR) models show that a shock to exchange rate volatility negatively affects trade volumes, and such negative effects are greater than the effects on trade price levels. JEL Classification Numbers: F14, F31, F41     

Common risk factors in returns in Asian emerging stock markets

This paper examines the application of the Fama and French's (1993) three-factor model in three Asian emerging markets (Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan). The empirical evidence is consistent with the US findings that the model can explain most of the variations in average returns. However, we find that the main contributing factor is the contemporaneous market excess returns. The impact of the size effect and book-to-market (BE/ME) factor is limited and in some cases insignificant. When the three-factor model is modified by using lagged market excess returns instead in order to check for the predictability of the market factor, the explanatory power of the model drops substantially but both the risk factors for size and BE/ME are now able to contribute significantly in explaining the cross-sectional variations of stock returns. Their explanatory powers are strongest for small-size with high BE/ME portfolios. The robustness of our results is also checked for the separation of up and down markets periods and January effect.     

The potential obstacles to economic cooperation in the asia-pacific region

The purpose of this article is to examine the obstacles that the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) needs to overcome in order to proceed from the envisioning-and-planning stage to the stage of implementation, and beyond. This article uses a computational general equilibrium model for analyzing the effects of APEC's regional coverage, China's World Trade Organization membership, and unilateral most favored nations extension. Overall, this article predicts that the potential obstacles associated with these issues will not hinder the formation of an APEC free-trade area.     

Buyers-to-shoppers ratio of shopping malls: A probit study in Hong Kong

Buyers-to-shoppers ratio (i.e. conversion rate) has long been one of the commonly adopted metrics in assessing retail performance of shopping malls, but it is almost always relied on interviews, consumer surveys, and questionnaires. These methods are intrinsically problematic in ascertaining the trustworthiness of the responses. This paper is probably the first objective study on the buyers-to-shoppers ratio based on actual observations in shopping malls in Hong Kong. A probit model is used to study factors affecting the ratio. The results show that consumer-surveys seriously over-estimate the ratio.     

领会中国经济政策的转变

一些不同寻常的迹象给中国经济投下阴影，韩国不能对这些变化不以为然，因为我们的经济高度依赖中国经济。 障碍包括物价不稳定，提高工资的压力，经济泡沫的危险，还有暴雪造成全国交通系统瘫痪。此外，谣传中国经济受到美国次贷危机后果的影响，而且将在北京奥运后硬着陆。中国总理温家宝甚至说今年可能是中国经济最具挑战性的一年。     

Bootstrap ARDL on energy-growth relationship for 22 OECD countries

Applying a recent bootstrap autoregressive distributed lag method, this article re-examines the energy-growth relationship for 22 OECD countries over the period 1966–2013. The empirical results suggest degenerate cases for eight countries. Only Japan is truly cointegrated. Some causality patterns are identified.     

Free Float And Market Liquidity: A Study Of Hong Kong Government Intervention

The August 1998 Hong Kong government intervention in the stock market offers a natural experiment for studying the relation between a free float and market liquidity, where a free float is the portion of listed share capital that is freely traded on the market. Our findings show that, relative to a group of control stocks, there was an increase in the price effects of trades for the 33 Hang Seng Index component stocks that were bought by the government. On the other hand, there was no clear cross‐sectional relation between the change in the price effect and the magnitude of government holdings or the decrease in the free float.