Why are Stock Splits Declining?

The percentage of firms undertaking stock splits has fallen from a peak of 23% in 1982 to less than 1% in 2009. Controlling for time trends and other economic determinants, the declining incidence of stock splits is significantly associated with a drop in household investors’ equity holdings and with a rise in household income. We also report a decline in the size of split factors that is associated with an increase in institutional ownership of equity and with an increase in household income. Collectively, the evidence is consistent with firms responding rationally to changes in investor characteristics.     

Can Commercialization Improve the Performance of Stock Exchanges Even without Corporatization?

We examine the performance of mutual, demutualized, and publicly listed exchanges and find evidence of improved performance along the exchange governance continuum, with publicly traded exchanges exhibiting better operating performance than demutualized exchanges. However, our robustness test, focusing on the corporatized exchanges that have gone through the three phases of the governance structure, shows that the listed exchanges do not exhibit evidence of incremental gains in efficiency and profitability beyond what they achieved at the demutualization phase. We conclude that commercialization provides sufficient freedom for exchanges to exploit monopoly rents before going public, while corporatization brings about proper valuation of the exchanges’ franchise.     

Does Academic Research Destroy Stock Return Predictability?

We study the out‐of‐sample and post‐publication return predictability of 97 variables shown to predict cross‐sectional stock returns. Portfolio returns are 26% lower out‐of‐sample and 58% lower post‐publication. The out‐of‐sample decline is an upper bound estimate of data mining effects. We estimate a 32% (58%–26%) lower return from publication‐informed trading. Post‐publication declines are greater for predictors with higher in‐sample returns, and returns are higher for portfolios concentrated in stocks with high idiosyncratic risk and low liquidity. Predictor portfolios exhibit post‐publication increases in correlations with other published‐predictor portfolios. Our findings suggest that investors learn about mispricing from academic publications.     

What Is the Expected Return on a Stock?

We derive a formula for the expected return on a stock in terms of the risk‐neutral variance of the market and the stock's excess risk‐neutral variance relative to that of the average stock. These quantities can be computed from index and stock option prices; the formula has no free parameters. The theory performs well empirically both in and out of sample. Our results suggest that there is considerably more variation in expected returns, over time and across stocks, than has previously been acknowledged.     

International Stock Return Predictability: What Is the Role of the United States?

We investigate lead‐lag relationships among monthly country stock returns and identify a leading role for the United States: lagged U.S. returns significantly predict returns in numerous non‐U.S. industrialized countries, while lagged non‐U.S. returns display limited predictive ability with respect to U.S. returns. We estimate a news‐diffusion model, and the results indicate that return shocks arising in the United States are only fully reflected in equity prices outside of the United States with a lag, consistent with a gradual information diffusion explanation of the predictive power of lagged U.S. returns.     

Valuation Ratios and Stock Return Predictability in South Africa: Is It There?

Using monthly South African data for January 1990 through October 2009, this paper, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to examine the predictability of real stock return based on valuation ratios, namely, price-dividend and price-earnings ratios. We cannot detect either short-horizon or long-horizon predictability; that is, the hypothesis that the current value of a valuation ratio is uncorrelated with future stock price changes cannot be rejected at both short and long horizons based on bootstrapped critical values constructed from linear representations of the data. We find, via Monte Carlo simulations, that the power to detect predictability in finite samples tends to decrease at long horizons in a linear framework. Although Monte Carlo simulations applied to exponential smooth-transition autoregressive models of the price-dividend and price-earnings ratios show increased power, the ability of the nonlinear framework in explaining the pattern of stock return predictability in the data does not show any promise at either short or long horizons, just as in the linear predictive regressions.     

Are Investors Concerned with Stock Market Upgrades? Evidence from Multivariate Framework Analysis

This study aims to examine the return and volatility responses to the announcement of stock market upgrades. It measures the direct effects of the recent Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) upgrade of the Qatar, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi stock exchanges from frontier to emerging markets by applying a nontraditional dummy variable event study using multivariate BEKK and DCC GARCH models. The results show clear evidence that contradicts the free information hypothesis and supports the price pressure hypothesis. Initially, the MSCI upgrade led to positive feedback from active investors due to the belief that this announcement will attract foreign institutional investors who play a vital role in improving the market’s performance.     

Are Individual Investors Influenced by the Optimism and Credibility of Stock Spam Recommendations?

This study examines attention‐driven investment decisions using a sample of firms essentially unknown to investors prior to becoming the target of a stock spam campaign. We show that the market reaction to spam varies predictably with the content of the spam message. Spam date returns and volume are significantly higher for stocks targeted by spam emails containing optimistic target price projections bundled with ostensibly credible information quoted from a previously issued company press release. There is also some evidence that disclaimers in spam messages reduce, but do not eliminate, the market response. Attention effects also contribute to spammers’ selection of stocks to target and to spam‐related enforcement actions by the Securities and Exchange Commission.     

Insightful Insiders? Insider Trading and Stock Return around Debt Covenant Violation Disclosures

This study asks whether insider trading associates with an information advantage around first‐time debt covenant violation disclosures in SEC filings, which potentially results from early access to information about the debt covenant violation disclosure. We document two results. First, we find net insider selling up to 12 months before a debt covenant violation disclosure, which precedes investors' negative returns before disclosure; and net insider buying up to 12 months after disclosure, which precedes investors' positive returns after disclosure. Second, we show that net insider trading one to two months before and after the violation disclosure associates predictably with investors' short‐term reaction to the covenant violation announcement.     

Investors’ Fear and Herding Behavior: Evidence from the Taiwan Stock Market

This article analyzes the influence of investors’ fear on their investment behavior in the Taiwan stock market. This study used the volatility index (VIX) as a barometer of investors’ fear. Our results show that herding behavior increases with the VIX; that is, herding behavior is encouraged by an increase in investors’ fear. Moreover, our results demonstrate that investors react more quickly to bad news than to good news when their fear increases, supporting the hypothesis of the presence of an asymmetric reaction to news. However, investors react more quickly to good news when their fear decreases, indicating an inverse asymmetric reaction. In addition, our empirical results reveal that herding behavior tends to exist on days with a large trading volume.     

Stock Return Predictability of Residual‐Income‐Based Valuation: Risk or Mispricing?

In an influential paper, Frankel and Lee (1998) conclude that the stock return predictability of the value‐to‐price ratio (V/P) results from market mispricing. This paper confirms whether the V/P reflects the rational risk premiums associated with the V/P factor or is better explained by market inefficiency. Following Daniel and Titman (1997), this paper examines whether the V/P characteristics or the V/P factor loadings predict stock returns. The findings show that the V/P loadings are positively associated with average returns even after controlling for the V/P characteristics in both time series and cross‐sectional tests. The overall results suggest that the mispricing explanation of the V/P effect is premature.     

Stock Market Anomalies: What Can We Learn from Repurchases and Insider Trading?

We examine whether managers’ trading decisions (both at a firm and personal level) are correlated with trading strategies suggested by the operating accruals and the post-earnings announcement drift (SUE) anomalies. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the use of managerial trading activity to infer managers’ private valuation about their own securities. Our results provide corroborative evidence for the accruals anomaly, i.e., managers’ repurchase and insider trading behavior varies consistently with the information underlying the operating accruals trading strategy. On the other hand, we do not find corroborative evidence for the SUE anomaly.

Can Stock Volatility Be Benign? New Measurements and Macroeconomic Implications

We find nonsynchronized movements of two new measures of financial market uncertainty—good and bad volatility—which are based on the maximum and minimum stock prices within a month. Good (bad) volatility is associated with better (worse) expectations about the future economic situation and clearly signals acceleration (deceleration) in economic activity. The VAR results indicate that (i) output, employment, and stock price plummet rapidly in response to a bad volatility shock, while their responses to a good volatility shock are modest, and (ii) bad volatility shocks explain the bulk of economic activity and stock price fluctuations in the medium run.     

Conservation,Discrimination, and Salvation: Investors’ Social Concerns in the Stock Market

Stocks appear to have investor clienteles based on their business practices and products. The variety in expressive benefits each individual receives from owning controversial stocks causes them to modify their portfolio to accommodate their beliefs. We examine the ownership of firms with social concerns and sin stocks (tobacco, alcohol and gambling). Women tilt their portfolios towards stocks with progressive labor policies for women and minorities. Younger investors avoid companies with poor environmental records but seek companies with progressive labor policies. Democratic voters favor stocks with progressive policies regarding women/minorities and gays/lesbians and are less likely to own sin stocks. Christian objections to homosexuality lead their members to invest less in stocks with progressive labor policies for gays and lesbians. The Christian denominations vary, though, in regard to sin stocks. Catholics are more likely while Mormons are less likely to own a sin stock relative to other investors. Socially responsible investors are clearly not all alike. Social characteristics that are important to one investor may not be important to another socially conscious investor.     

Fundamentals or Managerial Discretion? The Relationship between Accrual Variability and Future Stock Return Volatility

This study extends the theoretical framework of Callen and Segal (2004) and Vuolteenaho (2002) to investigate the association between accrual variability and firm‐level stock return volatility. The empirical evidence supports our prediction that increased uncertainty in current‐period accounting accruals is associated with significantly higher volatility of future stock returns, and the results are valid for measures of both systematic and idiosyncratic volatility. When accrual variability is decomposed into fundamental and discretionary portions, we find that the positive relationship between accrual variability and future stock return volatility is dominated by the fundamental component of accrual variability. Overall, our results suggest that uncertainty reflected in accrual information is subsequently reflected in the fluctuation of future stock returns, and that the predictive content in accruals primarily reflects firms' fundamental uncertainty, rather than any effects of managerial choices and interventions in the accounting process.     

How Do Institutional Investors Affect Corporate Performance? Evidence from Private Placements in China

Using data on private placements in China from 2007 to 2014, we show that abnormal returns of issuing companies’ stocks are significantly positive on the announcement day, but they become significantly negative during the event window [?20, +20]. Participation by institutional investors has a significant and negative impact on the short-term stock returns. This negative effect is also present in issuing companies’ long-term stock returns and profitability. Furthermore, we find that participation by institutional investors reduces dividend payments after private placements. Overall, our findings do not support the monitoring hypothesis of institutional investors’ role in corporate finance but are consistent with the management entrenchment hypothesis and shareholder pessimism hypothesis.     

Real-Estate Risk Effects on Financial Institutions’ Stock Return Distribution: a Bivariate GARCH Analysis

This paper examines two relationships using the bivariate generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic (GARCH) methodology. First, the relationship between equity returns of commercial banks, savings and loans (S&Ls) and life insurance companies (LICs), and those of the real-estate investment trusts (REITs), a proxy for the real-estate sector performance. Second, the relationship between conditional volatilities of the stock returns of these financial intermediaries (FIs) and that of REITs. The former relationship allows the spillover of returns between the real-estate and the financial intermediation sector to be analyzed. The latter allows an investigation of the prevalence, direction and strength of inter-sectoral risk transmission to be carried out. Several interesting results are obtained. First, the equity returns of the FIs considered follow a GARCH process and should be modeled accordingly. Second, as found in the literature, returns on REITs should be modeled using the Fama-French multiple factor model. However, this model has to be extended to incorporate a GARCH error structure. Third, all FI returns considered are highly sensitive to REIT returns and the effects are both statistically and economically significant. This is an indication that shocks to REITs returns spillover to the former markets. Fourth, spillover of increased volatility in the real-estate sector to S&Ls and LICs is significant but not to commercial banks.