The Weekend Effect, 'Reverse' Weekend Effect, and Firm Size

In this paper, we find a 'reverse%rsquo; weekend effect — whereby returns for Monday are positive and significantly greater than returns for the preceding Friday — in recent data for major stock indexes. We also find that, while a weak weekend effect exists in portfolios of smaller firms, the effect begins to diminish and weak 'reverse' weekend effect begins to appear in medium size firms. The 'reverse' weekend effect becomes strong and statistically significant in portfolios of large firms. The detection of a 'reverse' weekend effect in portfolios of large firms is a new finding in the literature.     

The Reversal of the Monday Effect: New Evidence from US Equity Markets

This article re-examines the Monday effect in the US stock market from 1964–1999 using daily returns from three large-cap indexes and two small-cap indexes. In the period before 1987, Monday returns are significantly negative in all five US stock indexes, confirming previous empirical findings. In the post-1987 period, we uncover a significant reversal of the Monday effect in the large-cap indexes (NYSE, S&38;P500 and DJCOMP), since Monday returns are significantly positive. Furthermore, significant differences in the persistence and reversal of the Monday effect are found between large-cap and small-cap stock indexes.     

Weekend Effect, 'Reverse' Weekend Effect, and Investor Trading Activities

Abstract:   In this study, we document evidence of a 'reverse' weekend effect – whereby Monday returns are significantly positive and they are higher than the returns on other days of the week – over an extended period of eleven years (from 1988 to 1998). We also find that the 'traditional' weekend effect and the 'reverse' effect are related to firm size in that the 'traditional' weekend effect tends to be associated with small firms while the 'reverse' weekend effect tends to be associated with large firms. In addition, we find that during the period in which the 'reverse' weekend effect is observed, Monday returns for large firms tend to follow previous Friday returns when previous Friday returns are positive , but they do not follow the previous Friday returns when Friday returns are negative . Furthermore, we find that during the period in which the 'reverse' weekend effect is observed, Monday returns are positively related to the volume of medium‐size and block transactions, but negatively related to the volume of odd‐lot transactions.     

The Weekend and 'Reverse' Weekend Effects: An Analysis by Month of the Year, Week of the Month, and Industry

In this paper, we examine whether the 'reverse' weekend effect recently documented by Brusa, Liu and Schulman (2000) is concentrated in a few industries or widely spread across all the industries. The findings in this paper indicate that the 'reverse' weekend effect exists not only in broad indices, but also in most industries . The results suggest that the 'reverse' weekend effect may be driven by economic events that affect all industries, rather than industry‐specific factors . Although the patterns of Monday returns are similar between broad indices and industry indices, they are different between the pre ‐ and the post ‐1988 periods. Monday returns tend to be negative in the pre ‐1988 period, but tend to be positive in the post ‐1988 period, for both broad market indices and industry indices. These conclusions are valid even after considering the influence of the month‐of‐the‐year and the week‐of‐the‐month effects.     

The Impact of the U.S. and the Japanese Equity Markets on the Emerging Asia-Pacific Equity Markets

Using a tri-variate vector autoregression model, we study the relationships between the four Asian emerging equity markets: Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, and the two largest equity markets in the world: U.S. and Japan. We find that while most of the unexpected variations in stock returns in these Asian emerging markets is explained by domestic own shocks, the impacts from the U.S. and Japan are larger in Hong Kong and Singapore than in Korea and Taiwan. This foreign effect is pronounced after the Crash of the October 1987, especially in Singapore. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Market Efficiency and the Returns to Simple Technical Trading Rules: New Evidence from U.S. Equity Market and Chinese Equity Markets

Numerous studies in the finance literature have investigated technical analysis to determine its validity as an investment tool. This study is an attempt to explore whether some forms of technical analysis can predict stock price movement and make excess profits based on certain trading rules in markets with different efficiency level. To avoid using arbitrarily selected 26 trading rules as did by Brock, Lakonishok and LeBaron (1992) and later by Bessembinder and Chan (1998), this paper examines predictive power and profitability of simple trading rules by expanding their universe of 26 rules to 412 rules. In order to find out the relationship between market efficiency and excess return by applying trading rules, we examine excess return over periods in U.S. markets and also compare the excess returns between U.S. market and Chinese markets. Our results found that there is no evidence at all supporting technical forecast power by these trading rules in U.S. equity index after 1975. During the 1990s break-even costs turned to be negative, –0.06%, even failing to beat a buy-holding strategyin U.S. equity market. In comparison, our results provide support for the technical strategies even in the presence of trading cost in Chinese stock markets.     

U.S. Equity Investment in Emerging Stock Markets

This article examines U.S. equity flows to emerging stock marketsfrom 1978 to 1991 and draws three main conclusions. First, despitethe recent increase in U.S. equity investment in emerging stockmarkets, the U.S. portfolio remains strongly biased toward domesticequities. Second, of the fraction of the U.S. portfolio thatis allocated to foreign equity investment, the share investedin emerging stock markets is roughly proportional to the shareof the emerging stock markets in the global market capitalizationvalue. Third, the volatility of U.S. transactions in emerging-marketequities is higher than in other foreign equities. The normalizedvolatility of U.S. transactions appears to be falling over time,however, and we find no relation between the volume of U.S.transactions in foreign equity and local turnover rates or volatilityof stock returns.     

Global Integration in Primary Equity Markets: The Role of U.S. Banks and U.S. Investors

We examine the costs and benefits of the global integrationof initial public offering (IPO) markets associated with thediffusion of U.S. underwriting methods in the 1990s. Bookbuildingis becoming increasingly popular outside the United States andtypically costs twice as much as a fixed-price offer. However,on its own, bookbuilding only leads to lower underpricing whenconducted by U.S. banks and/or targeted at U.S. investors. Formost issuers, the gains associated with lower underpricing outweighedthe additional costs associated with hiring U.S. banks or marketingin the United States. This suggests a quality/price trade-offcontrasting with the findings of Chen and Ritter, particularlysince non-U.S. issuers raising US$20 million–US$80 millionalso typically pay a 7% spread when U.S. banks and investorsare involved.     

Trading Returns for the Weekend Effect Using Intraday Data

The existence of the weekend effect has been documented as early as 1885. This paper examines whether the serial dependence in returns around weekends and the magnitude of negative Friday returns can be used to produce superior trading returns. We find some success for this endeavor after accounting for transaction costs (including the bid/ask spread), especially when trading is confined to weekends for which there are large negative Friday returns and to positions opened on Friday afternoons. The effect of stocks trading ex-dividend on Mondays does not appear to bias our results.     

Intraday Price Formation in U.S. Equity Index Markets

The market for U.S. equity indexes presently comprises floor‐traded index futures contracts, exchange‐traded funds (ETFs), electronically traded, small‐denomination futures contracts (E‐minis), and sector ETFs that decompose the S&P 500 index into component industry portfolios. This paper empirically investigates price discovery in this environment. For the S&P 500 and Nasdaq‐100 indexes, most of the price discovery occurs in the E‐mini market. For the S&P 400 MidCap index, price discovery is shared between the regular futures contract and the ETF. The S&P 500 ETF contributes markedly to price discovery in the sector ETFs, but there are only minor effects in the reverse direction.     

Transmission of Stock Returns and Volatility between the U.S. and Japan: Evidence from the Stock Index Futures Markets

In this paper, we examine the nature of transmission of stock returns and volatility between the U.S. and Japanese stock markets using futures prices on the S&P 500 and Nikkei 225 stock indexes. We use stock index futures prices to mitigate the stale quote problem found in the spot index prices and to obtain more robust results. By employing a two-step GARCH approach, we find that there are unidirectional contemporaneous return and volatility spillovers from the U.S. to Japan. Furthermore, the U.S.'s influence on Japan in returns is approximately four times as large as the other way around. Finally, our results show no significant lagged spillover effects in both returns and volatility from the Osaka market to the Chicago market, while a significant lagged volatility spillover is observed from the U.S. to Japan. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Taking the Long Way Home: U.S. Tax Evasion and Offshore Investments in U.S. Equity and Debt Markets

We empirically investigate one form of illegal investor‐level tax evasion and its effect on foreign portfolio investment. In particular, we examine a form of round‐tripping tax evasion in which U.S. individuals hide funds in entities located in offshore tax havens and then invest those funds in U.S. securities markets. Employing Becker's ( 1968 ) economic theory of crime, we identify the tax evasion component by examining how foreign portfolio investment varies with changes in the incentives to evade and the risks of detection. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical evidence of investor‐level tax evasion affecting cross‐border equity and debt investment.     

Random Walks and Market Efficiency Tests: Evidence from Emerging Equity Markets

We use the multiple variance-ratio test of Chow and Denning (1993) to examine the stochastic properties of local currency- and US dollar-based equity returns in 15 emerging capital markets. The technique is based on the Studentized Maximum Modulus distribution and provides a multiple statistical comparison of variance-ratios, with control of the joint-test's size. We find that the random walk model is consistent with the dynamics of returns in most of the emerging markets analyzed, which contrasts many random walk test results documented with the use of single variance-ratio techniques. Further, a runs test suggests that most of the emerging markets are weak-form efficient. Overall, our results suggest that investors are unlikely to make systematic nonzero profit by using past information in many of the examined markets, thus, investors should predicate their investment strategies on the assumption of random walks. Additionally, our results suggest exchange rate matters in returns' dynamics determination for some of the emerging equity markets we analyzed.     

法律环境、公司治理与利益侵占——基于中、美股票市场的比较分析

本文主要研究法律环境、公司治理与利益侵占的关系。我们以在美国上市的50家中国公司为研究对象,并按照同行业、同规模的标准选取在国内上市的50家中国公司作为配比样本,考察在中、美不同的法律环境下,两组样本在公司治理结构和利益侵占程度方面是否存在差异,以及法律环境和公司治理结构的不同是否能够解释利益侵占程度的差异。实证研究发现,与在中国上市的同类公司相比,在美国上市的中国公司具有更有利于投资者保护的治理结构安排,且利益侵占程度更小,法律环境和公司治理结构安排的不同都能够解释利益侵占程度的差异,但是法律环境的解释能力更强。     

Shareholder Disputes and Commonality in Liquidity: Evidence from the Equity Markets in China

Asia-Pacific Financial Markets - This paper examines liquidity commonality is caused by correlation in institutional herding and shareholder disputes due to irrational investors over the period...     

上市公司权益资本成本的测度与评价——基于我国证券市场的经验检验

权益资本成本(CofEC)是公司筹资和投资决策时需要考虑的重要问题。然而,如何测定公司的权益资本成本,目前尚未得出统一的结论。本文在现有研究的基础上,从事后和事前两个角度测度了我国上市公司的权益资本成本,并从经济和统计两个角度对不同的测度进行了评价。研究得出,不同方法得出的权益资本成本测度差异明显,最大差异达到了12.13%,这些差异对我国公司融资顺序(偏好)是否主要基于资本成本考虑的判断会造成重大影响。从经济角度看,事前权益资本成本测度要优于CAPM和Fama-French三因子模型下事后权益资本成本,在事前权益资本成本测度中,国内外文献中普遍运用的GLS模型下的CofEC表现不够理想,而PEG和MPEG模型下的CofEC能更好地捕捉各风险因素的影响,尽管其时间序列计量误差方差相对较大。     

Public Information Arrival and the Fisher Effect in Emerging Markets: Evidence from Stock and Bond Markets in Turkey

We examine the impact of inflation on nominal stock returns and interest rates in Turkey's emerging economy, which has a moderately high, persistent, and volatile inflation rate. Empirical evidence indicates that Turkey's inflation increased more than nominal stock returns and interest rates, implying that real returns to investors declined during our sample period. Among the different sector indexes we study, the financials sector serves as the best hedge against expected inflation, and the Fisher effect appears to hold only for this sector. We also find that public information arrival plays an important role, especially in the stock market.     

中美资本市场财富效应比较研究

本文从股利支付和资本利得的角度对比分析了中美资本市场财富效应水平,并对其影响因素展开分析。研究发现,我国资本市场财富效应不够显著,A股上市公司虽然具有较高的股利支付倾向,但股利支付率和资本利得属性较弱;股利支付行为迎合监管动机较强,融资分红特征明显,股票股利支付行为具有高送转特征;资本市场估值中枢下移,指数波动性较高,资本利得属性较差。美股上市公司虽然股利支付意愿不及A股,但股利支付率和资本利得属性较强,且上市公司不存在明显的融资分红倾向。基于此,本文从控股股东属性、企业生命周期、管理层侵占行为、宏观经济和资本市场环境四个维度对A股市场财富效应水平展开深入探讨,并从提升公司质量、改善盈利能力、调整投资者结构、加强市场建设、优化股利监管制度五方面提出了改善我国资本市场财富效应的政策建议。     

Volatility Spillover Effects in Interregional Equity Markets: Empirical Evidence from Brazil and Turkey

We investigate volatility spillovers between two stock markets: Turkey and Brazil. Using a misspecification-robust causality-in-variance test, we find evidence supporting volatility spillovers from the São Paulo Stock Exchange to the Istanbul Stock Exchange. Moreover, the results imply that financial crises may change the nature of volatility spillovers between the two markets by adding an additional channel of volatility transmission from Turkey to Brazil.