Hybrid markets, tick size and investor trading costs

This paper shows how the tick size affects equilibrium outcomes in a hybrid stock market such as the NYSE that features both a specialist and a limit order book. Reducing the tick size facilitates the specialist's ability to step ahead of the limit order book, resulting in a reduction in the cumulative depth of the limit order book at prices above the minimum tick. If market demand is price-sensitive, and there are costs of limit order submission, the limit order book can be destroyed by tick sizes that are either too small or too large. We show that trading cost is minimized at larger tick sizes for larger market orders, creating an incentive to submit smaller orders when tick size is reduced. With a smaller tick size, specialist participation increases and specialist profit increases slightly for small market orders, and considerably for large market orders.     

The impact of mandatory IFRS reporting on institutional trading costs: Evidence from Australia

This study examines the impact of mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the market quality of the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) 200 constituent stocks. Using traditional metrics that are consistent with prior literature (i.e., bid‐ask spreads), the first stage analysis confirms that stock liquidity has improved. However, when the analysis is extended to consider the trading costs incurred by market participants (i.e., execution shortfall), results suggest liquidity has not changed significantly. The paper utilizes rich unique datasets that contain detailed trade information, and findings are robust after controlling for trade difficulty and market conditions. In the era of High Frequency Trading (HFT) and occurrences of ‘fleeting’ liquidity, this paper provides some evidence that while IFRS may have enhanced ‘visible’ bid‐ask spreads, tangible liquidity for market participants, particularly global institutional investors, has not improved significantly.     

Endogenous informed trading in the presence of trading costs: Theory and evidence

The basic premise of the model we propose is that market frictions (trading costs) force traders with market-wide information to strategically choose which securities to trade in. We study the effect of recognizing trading costs on the choices of informed traders and the resulting statistical properties of security prices. Specifically, we show that (1) stocks with intermediate β's have the least informative prices, even though they are traded by the greatest number of informed traders; (2) for high β securities, the contemporaneous correlation of prices is close to the correlation in fundamental values; (3) a security with a higher β, higher volume of liquidity trading and lower idiosyncratic variance is more likely to lead another security. With market capitalization as a proxy for the level of liquidity trading, these specific predictions of the model on the lead–lag relationship are also shown to be strongly supported by the data.     

Positivism in finance and its implication for the diversification finance research: Diversifying finance research: From financialization to sustainability

This paper is a complementary comment to the article recently published in IRFA by Thomas Lagoarde-Segot on the necessity of diversification of modelling in finance. In his claim, the author explained that financial concepts used by the mainstream are not neutral because they refer to a particular ethical judgement mainly focused on the shareholders' interest. In this comment, I explain that this ethical judgement historically results from the role playing by the Gaussian distribution in finance: while this statistical framework gave the first scientific foundations to finance in the 1960s, its symmetrical configuration implies that negative changes occur with the same probability than positive ones. In this context, all potential intervention (regulation) could only interfere (disturb) this “ethically fair situation” within the only perturbing element is the shareholder whose behaviours are likely to influence the market. After having explained that this reasoning is based on an a priori statement about observational facts (in opposition with positivism), I present this situation as an opportunity for current researchers in finance to clarify their implicit assumptions; which would open the door to a diversification of modelling in finance as Lagoarde-Segot promoted it in his IRFA article.     

The dynamics of dealer markets and trading costs

In this study we examine the temporal dynamics of dealer market share and their ramification for competition and trading costs using a large sample of NASDAQ securities. Our results show that although the total market share of the top five dealers is relatively stable over time, there is significant monthly variation in the composition of the top five dealers. We show that market share turbulence among top dealers is another form of competition that narrows bid–ask spreads, especially for stocks with less competitive market structure.     

The role of institutional investors in corporate and entrepreneurial finance

Institutional investors, collectively the majority shareholders of most publicly traded corporations, play important roles in almost all aspects of corporate finance. This special issue puts together sixteen papers covering a wide range of topics, such as M&As, capital structure, bonds and loans, corporate governance, IPOs, VCs, SEOs, broker/underwriter relationships, behavioral finance, corporate disclosure, and regulation. These special issue papers demonstrate that institutional investors, a traditional focus of investments research, are worthy of continued and further academic inquiry in many corporate finance topics. In terms of directions for future research, we believe that the availability of new datasets (or existing datasets not yet widely used in corporate finance) and the application of new or unique research methodologies could bear fruit for researchers, as demonstrated by some papers in this special issue. In terms of datasets, the success of Abel Noser institutional trading data serves as a good example.     

The dynamics of individual and institutional trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange

We investigate the daily dynamic relation between returns and institutional and individual trades in the emerging Chinese stock market. Consistent with the hypotheses of trend-chasing and attention-grabbing trading, we find that the response of individual trading to return shocks is much stronger than that of institutional trading, and individuals are net buyers following return shocks. Second, we find that past individual buys and sells have predictive power, whereas past institutional buys and sells have predictive power for market returns in longer horizons. However, both institutional and individual trading activities are more strongly related to past trades than past returns, and individual trading is also influenced by institutional trading. Moreover, we find that institutional trading in the largest quintile leads the trading in the smallest quintile, but no such lead–lag relation is found for individual trades. Finally, we find that the average cumulative abnormal trading volume of individuals is much larger than that of institutions around the firms' earnings announcement, suggesting that less-informed individual investors are more heavily influenced by firm-specific information disclosures and attention-grabbing events.     

Efficiency and the trading system: The case of SETSmm

This paper studies the impact that a change from a dealer system to a market-maker supported auction system has on market quality. We study the impact that the introduction of SETSmm at the London Stock Exchange had on firm value, price efficiency and liquidity. We discover a small SETSmm return premium associated with the announcement that securities are to migrate to the new trading system. Moreover, securities that migrate to SETSmm are characterized by improvements to liquidity and pricing efficiency. We find that these changes are related to the return premium.     

On the distribution and estimation of trading costs

This paper investigates the uncertainty about the trading costs associated with a given portfolio strategy. I derive accurate approximations of the ex ante probability distributions of proportional trading costs and portfolio turnover under the conventional assumption of normal asset returns. Based on these approximations, I express the expected trading costs as a function of asset and portfolio characteristics. All else equal, the expected trading costs increase with: i) the deviations of the expected asset returns from the expected portfolio return, ii) the assets' volatility and iii) the portfolio volatility. At the same time, they decrease with the covariance between the assets and the portfolio. Furthermore, I propose novel estimators of the expected turnover and trading costs and show that they offer small bias and low variance, even when the sample size is small. Finally, I incorporate my results into a portfolio selection framework to produce portfolios with low levels of risk and trading costs. Several experiments with real and simulated data confirm the practical value of the results.     

The implications of liquidity and order flows for neoclassical finance

While liquidity and order flows are microstructure constructs, we show that they have profound implications for all of finance. In particular, liquidity is intimately connected with the fundamental building blocks of finance, namely, the pricing of risk, the powerful no-arbitrage theorems, and market efficiency. Large-sample studies of liquidity show that both liquidity and liquidity risk are priced in the cross-section of stock returns, the law of one price is more likely to hold in more liquid markets, and liquidity enhances market efficiency. Hence policies to enhance liquidity encourage efficiency and reduce costs of raising capital. Furthermore, order flows are powerful predictors of returns as well as the real economy.     

The turn of the month effect in India: A case of large institutional trading pattern as a source of higher liquidity

We examine (via parametric and non-parametric tests) the turn of the month effect in the returns of various, size-conditioned Indian stock indices, across time, in up and down markets and independent of other seasonal anomalies. We find little support for the payday and the US macroeconomic news announcements hypotheses. Instead, we show that institutional traders (foreign and domestic) significantly increase their trading volumes (on the buying side) at month end, potentially pushing prices up. There is no evidence of a similar behavior on the retail side. We suggest this to be a major cause of the observable TOM effect in India.     

The profitability,costs and systematic risk of the post-earnings-announcement-drift trading strategy

This paper re-examines the profitability of the post-earnings-announcement-drift (PEAD) trading strategy using a practical simulation approach that aligns with a fund manager’s investment perspective. It allows us to calculate the break-even transaction costs of following a PEAD strategy, and permits the explicit incorporation of transaction costs. Using US data from 1974 to 2007, we show that the traditional event-study method understates the risk and overstates the abnormal return of the PEAD strategy. Accounting for transaction costs in a practical simulation framework, we show there is no abnormal return (alpha) from the PEAD strategy in multi-factor asset pricing regression analyses. These results are robust to sub-period analyses and alternative transaction cost measures. The effects of intraday timing and information risk on the PEAD strategy are also explored. Overall, our study shows that the practical aspects of implementing the PEAD strategy are vitally important to evaluating the risk and return of the strategy. We provide a practical, analytical tool that can be directly adopted by fund managers to study the PEAD strategy with their institutional parameters of transaction costs and market timing.     

Stealth trading: The case of the Tokyo Stock Exchange

The stealth trading hypothesis asserts that informed traders trade strategically by breaking up their orders so as to more easily hide among the liquidity traders. Using data for the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), a pure order-driven market, we find evidence that price changes are driven by small- and medium-size trades, with small trades making the greatest contribution to price change relative to their contribution to trading volume. We also find that large trades explain a greater portion of the cumulative price change on high volatility days. Hence, our results support the stealth trading hypothesis for the TSE.     

Trading costs for listed options: The implications for market efficiency

This paper reexamines the anomalous evidence concerning the efficiency of the listed options exchanges. We focus on the structure of trading costs in that market, and note several costs which generally have been ignored, the largest of which is the bid-ask spread. When we adjust the published trading rules for our estimates of these trading costs, the reported abnormal returns are eliminated.     

The market for shareholder voting rights around mergers and acquisitions: Evidence from institutional daily trading and voting

This paper explores the market for voting rights and shareholder voting around 350 mergers and acquisitions between 1999 and 2005 by examining institutional-investor trading and voting outcomes. Our results show institutions in aggregate buy shares and hence voting rights before merger record dates. This trading is not related to proxies for merger arbitrage or trading around merger announcements, and thus is not simply a continuation of the latter. Trading and buying before record dates are positively related to voting turnout and negatively related to shareholder support of merger proposals. We explore several possible interpretations of these results.     

Cross-national differences in access to finance: Influence of culture and institutional environments

In spite of rising interest, there is little prior research on the degree to which national differences in access to finance are determined by national culture. Using World Economic Forum survey data for over eighty countries, this paper examines the determinants of (1) access to equity financing, (2) access to loan financing (3) access to venture capital and (4) overall access to capital. We document that less access to financing is associated with the cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and masculinity. But, greater access to financing is positively associated with greater national wealth and better investor protection. Consistent with earlier literature we also find that greater access to finance is associated with greater government favoritism toward selected firms. These results should be of much interest to policy makers, scholars, bankers and managers of multinational firms.     

The growth in equity market size and trading activity: An international study

This paper presents new evidence on the role of macroeconomic and institutional factors in equity market development and on the sources of equity market growth. Using panel data on 33 countries, I find that development of financial intermediaries and trade openness are positively associated with equity market size, and that development of financial intermediaries is also positively associated with the level of activity in equity markets. Government consumption is negatively associated with equity market activity. I construct a direct estimate of the effect of institutional factors on equity market development that compares a country's actual level of development to a hypothetical “best-practice” country having the same macroeconomic fundamentals as the original country. I show that the level of equity market development of an average country is around 30% below its maximum potential. There are wide differences in institutional characteristics across countries and over time, and Canada, the United States, and Singapore possess the most shareholder-friendly institutional frameworks that foster larger and more active equity markets. It appears that institutional improvements and changes in financial technology have provided the major impetus for the phenomenal expansion of global equity markets.     

Determinants of bid and ask quotes and implications for the cost of trading

Financial transaction costs are time varying. This paper proposes a model that relates transaction cost to characteristics of order flow. We obtain qualitatively consistent model results for different stocks and across different time periods. We find that an unusual excess of buyers (sellers) relative to sellers (buyers) tends to increase the ask (bid) price. Hence, the ask and bid components of spread change asymmetrically about the efficient price. For a fixed order imbalance surprise these effects are muted when unanticipated total volume is high. Unexpected high volatility in the transaction price process tends to widen the spread symmetrically about the efficient price. Our findings are consistent with predications from market microstructure theory that the cost of market making should depend on both the risk of trading with better-informed traders and inventory risk. We also find that order flow surprises have a significant impact on the efficient price and can also explain a substantial amount of persistence in the volatility of the efficient price. This dependence does not violate the efficient market hypothesis since the surprises, by definition, are not predictable.     

100 research ideas: extending the frontiers of research in corporate finance

Where can one systematically find research ideas? I propose a scheme to classify and broadly generalize the sources of inspiration for research topics, with emphasis on corporate finance. In the process, I propose 100 new research topics awaiting the brave and persistent.