On the Chinese B-share price discount puzzle: Some new evidence

Since February 2001, the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission allowed domestic trade in foreign-currency denominated shares (B-shares) whose trade was originally restricted to foreign investors. We investigate possible effects of lifting the ownership restriction on the B-share discounts and explore why the discount persists even after removing the restriction. The discount is the percentage by which the B-shares are priced less than the otherwise identical Chinese-currency denominated shares held by domestic investors (A-shares). The results suggest that prices in the B- and A-share markets are closely linked over the long-run and that this equilibrium relationship strengthened in the post-lifting period. Our results further rule out information asymmetry as a reason for the continuation of the discount and support instead the importance of firm size and relative supply of the B-shares.     

Heterogeneous firm-level responses to trade liberalization: A test using stock price reactions

This paper presents novel empirical evidence on key predictions of heterogeneous firm models by examining stock market reactions to the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement of 1989 (CUSFTA). I derive testable predictions for a class of models based on Melitz (2003). Using the uncertainty surrounding CUSFTA's ratification, I show that the pattern of abnormal returns of Canadian manufacturing firms was strongly consistent with predictions related to export (U.S.) tariff reductions, but less so with predictions related to import (Canadian) tariff reductions. Lower Canadian tariffs did have an effect through the implied reduction in intermediate input tariffs, however.     

The signaling effects associated with convertible debt design

In this paper we investigate whether the terms used in the design of a convertible debt issue act as a signal of the issuing firm's future growth prospects. Our general premise is that convertible debt design terms are interrelated and arranged in a manner that signals asymmetric information to market participants. Empirical tests support our hypothesis, even after controlling for risk, firm size, time-to-maturity, and industry effects. Firms issuing convertible debt that arrange terms to take advantage of relatively better future growth prospects are found to have a relatively lower negative price reaction around the announcement of the offer.     

Call Auction Transparency and Market Liquidity: Evidence from China

This paper uses the natural experiment offered by the Shanghai Stock Exchange to investigate the impact of opening call auction transparency on market liquidity. We find that the dissemination of indicative trade information during the pre‐open call auction session leads to an overall improvement in stock liquidity in the continuous trading session. Bid‐ask spreads narrow in the first trading hour because adverse selection risk fell significantly and there is less price volatility in the continuous market. This effect is greater for actively traded securities than illiquid securities. Our findings are robust for different lengths of sample period, different lengths of trading hours after market open, and stocks that had (and had not) reformed the share split structure during our research period.     

Business cycles and monetary regimes in emerging economies: A role for a monopolistic banking sector

This study shows that the presence of imperfect competition in the banking system propagates external shocks and amplifies the business cycle. Strategic limit pricing, aimed at protecting retail niches from potential competitors, generates countercyclical bank markups. Markup increments during recessions directly increase borrowing costs for firms and indirectly damage the financial position of firms' balance-sheets, increasing the risk perception of lenders. I use Bayesian techniques and data from Argentina to show that the inclusion of monopolistic banking improves the fit of the New Keynesian small open economy model.     

Assessing the effectiveness of the Paulson “teaser freezer” Plan: Evidence from the ABX index

How did investors holding assets backed by subprime residential mortgages react when Treasury Secretary Paulson announced the so-called “teaser freezer” plan to modify mortgages in December 2007? We apply event-study methodology to the ABX index, the only source of daily securities prices in subprime mortgage markets. Our results show that investors initially perceived that the Paulson Plan would improve conditions in subprime housing markets. Specifically, those investors who held the riskiest securities backed by subprime residential housing benefited the most from the Paulson Plan. These findings do not extend to the longer term, suggesting that any positive effects from Paulson Plan were overwhelmed by the continued deterioration in housing markets.     

The Market Timing Power of Moving Averages: Evidence from US REITs and REIT Indexes

I present evidence that a moving average (MA) trading strategy dominates buying and holding the underlying asset in a mean‐variance sense using monthly returns of value‐weighted and equal‐weighted US REIT indexes over the period January 1980 until December 2010. The abnormal returns are largely insensitive to the four Carhart factors and produce economically and statistically significant alphas of between 10 and 15% per year after transaction costs. This performance is robust to different lags of the MA and in subperiods while investor sentiment, liquidity risks, business cycles, up and down markets, and the default spread cannot fully account for its performance. The MA strategy works just as well with randomly generated returns and bootstrapped returns. The substantial market timing ability of the MA strategy appears to be the main driver of the abnormal returns. The returns to the MA strategy resemble the returns of an imperfect at‐the‐money protective put strategy relative to the underlying portfolio. The lagged signal to switch has substantial predictive power over the subsequent return of the REIT index. The MA strategy avoids the sharp downturn at the beginning of 2008 and substantially outperforms the cumulative returns of the buy‐and‐hold strategy using all of the 20 REIT indexes. The results from applying the MA strategy with 274 individual REITs largely corroborate the findings for the REIT indexes.     

Bidder's Gain: Evidence from Termination Returns

In most cases, bidder's stock returns around merger announcement convey more information than the synergy created from the acquisition. To overcome the interpretation problem, I study the bidder's return from the perspective of deal termination. Using a hand‐collected dataset on terminated merger proposals, I investigate termination returns in deals canceled for reasons unrelated to the bidder's stand‐alone valuation. I find that bidder's gain varies significantly with the type of target acquired. Further evidence suggests that the liquidity need of private target significantly contributes to the positive gain to the bidder.     

Stock Market's Response to Real Output Shocks: Connection Restored but Delayed

We propose a vector autoregression with asymmetric leads model to combine the forward‐looking, contemporaneous, and delayed responses of the stock market to output news. Using this approach, we document that the stock market's connection to real output, shown by Binswanger to have been broken since the early 1980s, has been restored after 1998, however, via a delayed response. Subperiods mainly differ in terms of delayed response, portraying an interesting evolution of market participants' response to macroeconomic information based on the realized persistence of output shocks.     

Investor base and corporate borrowing: Evidence from international bonds

We examine international bond issues by US firms to study the benefits of investor taste for cross-border security issuances. We proxy for firms' international investor taste with the fraction of prior international bond holding in firms' domestic and international bonds and find that international investor demand increases with such taste. Moreover, the offering yield spreads on international bonds are lower than domestic offering yield spreads for these internationally recognized firms and they have higher probability of issuing internationally. Such international recognition may occur, for instance, if the diversification benefits of adding the security to investor's portfolio outweigh the negative effects of higher renegotiation costs for international compared to domestic investors.     

Non‐Tradable Share Reform,Liquidity, and Stock Returns in China

This article studies the influence of the non‐tradable share reform in the cross‐section of stock returns in China. Prior research has generally neglected this important development in the Chinese stock market. We find that the firm‐specific illiquidity measures that reflect direct transaction costs, price impact and difficulties in trading immediacy, exhibit a positive and significant relationship with stock returns. These effects are particularly pronounced after the non‐tradable share reform. Furthermore, in the post‐reform era, portfolios with high illiquidity (i.e. high relative bid–ask spread, high Amihud illiquidity, low Amivest liquidity ratio) significantly outperform portfolios with low illiquidity, controlling for size, and book‐to‐market effects.     

When Is a Firm's Information Asymmetry Priced? The Role of Institutional Investors

This study reexamines the competing claims that probability of informed trading (PIN) is priced in the cross‐section of stock returns while adjusted PIN (AdjPIN), the component of PIN related to information asymmetry, is not. We find that behind these seemingly contradicting conclusions is the role of institutional investors, and the pricing of PIN and AdjPIN depends on institutional ownership. Only for those stocks with low institutional ownership are both PIN and AdjPIN priced. Our findings imply that investors require compensation for information risk only from stocks with low institutional ownership.     

The trade-creating effects of business and social networks: evidence from France

Using theory-grounded estimations of trade flow equations, this paper investigates the role that business and social networks play in shaping trade between French regions. The bilateral intensity of networks is quantified using the financial structure and location of French firms and bilateral stocks of migrants. Compared to a situation without networks, migrants are shown to double bilateral trade flows, while networks of firms multiply trade flows by as much as four in some specifications. Finally, taking network effects into account divides the estimation of the impact of transport costs and of the effect of administrative borders by around three.     

Managerial Talent and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): How Do Talented Managers View Corporate Social Responsibility?

Motivated by the ongoing debate on the costs and benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR), we explore how talented managers view CSR investments. Based on nearly 20,000 observations across 17 years, our evidence reveals a nonmonotonic effect of managerial talent on CSR. Exploiting a novel measure of managerial ability, we find that talented managers view CSR investments favorably. However, only those with especially strong talent are in favor of CSR investments. For executives ranked above the 75th percentile in terms of managerial talent, an increase in managerial ability leads to more CSR investments, suggesting that these strongly talented managers perceive CSR as enhancing firm performance. In contrast, for those with weaker talent, CSR investments are negatively associated with managerial ability, implying that these weakly talented managers view CSR as a wasteful deployment of resources. Further evidence shows that our conclusion is unlikely confounded by endogeneity.     

How Reliable Are the Findings of ‘Foreign’ Investor Studies That Use TIC Data? A Look from the Host Market

Empirical literature on foreign investors' trading in stock markets heavily relies on US Treasury International Capital (TIC) data. Biases in TIC data and the fact that it represents only one source country raise questions on how reliable the conclusions based on TIC data are. Employing novel data of complete foreign flows compiled at destination, we answer these questions. Although the correlations between net flows derived from TIC and destination‐compiled data are low, and visible differences exist in some individual country results, TIC findings are not far off in central tendency. Notably, however, net foreign flows' persistence, positive response to world returns and positive contemporaneous correlation with local returns are more significant than TIC data suggest. Measurement noise in TIC data appears to result in underestimation of these key features.     

Price and Earnings Momentum,Transaction Costs,and an Innovative Practitioner Technique

We use an innovative practitioner technique to investigate the interplay between the ex post performance of momentum strategies and transaction costs, rebalancing frequency, turnover constraints, and fund size. We have three interrelated main results: first, the level of and correlation between active returns to price momentum and earnings momentum strategies vary dramatically with these factors; second, strategies that are fearful of ex ante transaction costs generate returns net of transaction costs that are far superior to the net returns of naive strategies; and third, obtaining better traction with the unique elements of each strategy yields a more profitable combined strategy.     

Momentum Strategies and Investor Sentiment in the REIT Market

Comparing across three momentum measures, we empirically find that the 52‐week high strategy plays a dominant role in generating momentum profits in the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) market. The profitability of the 52‐week high strategy, however, varies with the state of investor sentiment. Specifically, we find that the 52‐week high momentum earns significantly positive returns following optimistic periods and significantly negative returns following pessimistic periods. Further evidence indicates that investor sentiment serves as a better predictive variable in explaining the REIT momentum than market states, business cycles, legislation changes, and monetary policy changes. Overall, our findings are in line with behavioral theories in explaining the REIT momentum.     

Outside directors, board interlocks and firm performance: Empirical evidence from Colombian business groups

We investigate the relation of board structure through the appointments of outside directors and the role of busy directors on firm return on assets within an environment of no regulation for privately held firms and voluntary adoption of corporate best practices for security issuers with family controlling blockholders. This study relies on a sample of an average of 335 firms per year for the 1996-2006 period, where 244 are private firms and 285 are affiliated to one of the seven largest non-financial business groups in the country. Five of these groups were, in 2006, still family-controlled. We find a positive relation between both the ratio of outside directors, and the degree of board interlocks, with firm return-on-assets. Outside busy directors turned out to be key drivers of improved firm performance. Appointments of outsiders are endogenous to firm ownership structure. Blockholder activism as well as contestability becomes an internal mechanism that improves director monitoring and ex-post firm valuation.     

Market Timing With Moving Averages

I present evidence that a moving average (MA) trading strategy has a greater average return and skewness as well as a lower variance compared to buying and holding the underlying asset using monthly returns of value‐weighted US decile portfolios sorted by market size, book‐to‐market, and momentum, and seven international markets as well as 18,000 individual US stocks. The MA strategy generates risk‐adjusted returns of 3–7% per year after transaction costs. The performance of the MA strategy is driven largely by the volatility of stock returns and resembles the payoffs of an at‐the‐money protective put on the underlying buy‐and‐hold return. Conditional factor models with macroeconomic variables, especially the default premium, can explain some of the abnormal returns. Standard market timing tests reveal ample evidence regarding the timing ability of the MA strategy.