Characteristics and behavior of newly listed firms: Evidence from the Asia-Pacific region

We examine the size, profitability and delisting experience during 1980–1999 of new lists in the Pacific Basin countries. We also examine the impact of the legal environment on post-listing behavior. We find that new lists are more numerous in common law countries. They are smaller than seasoned firms, regardless of legal regime. New lists are more profitable in civil law countries, but this is due to the high profitability of Japanese new lists. Asian new lists have lower rates of delisting compared to U.S. firms. The delisting frequency of seasoned firms exceeds that of new lists for our sample countries.     

Stock market liberalization and return volatility: Evidence from the emerging market of Sri Lanka

This study examines the impact of liberalization of the Sri Lankan stock market on return volatility. We specify GARCH and TGARCH models of volatility, and estimate them using 16 years of weekly returns for the period from 1985 to 2000. The results show that liberalization of the market to foreign investors significantly increased the return volatility in the Colombo Stock Exchange. Both conditional and unconditional volatility measures are the highest in the liberalization period. Negative return shocks lead to lower volatility suggesting that there is no leverage effect, and this appears to reflect the very low levels of leverage used by Sri Lankan companies.     

Audit and reporting delays: Evidence from an emerging market

This article reports the results of an empirical investigation of the timeliness of annual reports of an unbalanced panel of 231 firms-years of financial and nonfinancial companies listed on the Bahrain Stock Exchange. It is found that the determinants of timeliness of annual reporting are company size, profitability, and leverage. No evidence was found to support the effect of accounting complexity or auditor type (Big Four or non-Big Four). Furthermore, the corporate governance proxies were found to be the determinants of the period between the auditors' signature dates and the publication dates.     

Value relevance of accounting information: Evidence from an emerging market

Without making any distinction of the applicable accounting standards, this paper investigates, firstly, the value relevance of accounting information from 1999 to 2012 in different segments of the Chinese stock market. This investigation includes A-shares, prepared under Chinese Accounting Standards (CAS) for domestic firms; B-shares, prepared under either the International Accounting Standards (IAS) or International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for both domestic and overseas firms; and H-shares prepared under either the IAS or Hong Kong GAAP for Hong Kong and overseas firms. Then, the paper examines whether or not the converged IFRS with CAS, applicable from 2007 onwards, is more value relevant when compared with prior to the 2007's standards (CAS, IAS, Hong Kong GAAP for A-share, B-share, and H-share markets, respectively). Based on 34,020 firm-year observations and after controlling for industry- and year-fixed effects, the findings suggest that accounting information is value relevant with A- and B-share markets, while it is partially relevant with the H-share market. The paper finds that the converged IFRS with CAS is more value relevant in A-shares and B-shares and it is partially more value relevant with the H-share market. These findings have implications for both policymakers and investors since they provide further empirical evidence for the current policy procedure which harmonizes local GAAP with IFRS.     

Impact of short selling activity on market dynamics: Evidence from an emerging market

With unique daily short sale data of Borsa Istanbul (stock exchange of Turkey), we investigate the dynamic relationship between short selling activity and volatility, liquidity and market return from January 2005 to December 2012 using a VAR(p)-cDCC-FIEGARCH(1,d,1) approach. Our findings suggest that short sellers are contrarian traders and contribute to efficient stock market in Turkey. We also show that increased short selling activity is associated with higher liquidity and decreased volatility. However this relation weakens during the financial turmoil of 2008. Our results indicate that any ban on short sales may be detrimental for financial stability and market quality in Turkey.     

Bond market development and bank stability: Evidence from emerging markets

We investigate how bond market development shapes banks’ risk taking in terms of portfolio structure, liquidity risk, and overall bank risk. Exploiting a bank-level database of 26 emerging markets, we find that larger bond markets are associated with stronger bank liquidity positions, lower portfolio risk of banks, and higher overall stability of banks. The effect of bond market development on bank risk taking remains robust across different levels of bank size and capital sufficiency. Overall, we find new evidence of a complementary relationship between bond market development and bank soundness.     

Manipulation in the bond market and the role of investment funds: Evidence from an emerging market

The aim of our research is to test for manipulation in the bond market, and to establish whether the practice of benchmarking investment funds encourages such interference. We analyse end-of-day and intraday trading data from the Borsa Istanbul Bond Securities Market between 2014 and 2018 along with specific data from investment fund sector over the same period. Our results indicate that treasury bonds have most likely been manipulated at the months' end by trading activities of investment funds. Price and volume rose significantly in the run up to the end of the month before falling off in the days following.     

Short-term overreaction to specific events: Evidence from an emerging market

This paper investigates the short-term overreaction to specific events and whether stock prices are predictable in the Egyptian stock exchange (EGX). We find evidence of the short-term overreaction in the EGX. Losers (“bad news” portfolios) significantly outperform winners (“good news” portfolios) and investors can earn abnormal return by selling the winners and buying losers. Terrorist attacks have negative and significant abnormal returns for three days post event followed by price reversals on day four post event. Whereas, the tensions in the Middle East region have a negative and significant abnormal returns on event day followed by price reversals on day one post event. Moreover, the formation of a new government has no effect on the average abnormal returns post event in the EGX. The results also show that small firms tend to have greater price reversals compared to large firms. Overall, our results provide evidence of the leakage of information in the EGX.     

Equity market integration in the Asia-Pacific region: A smooth transition analysis

We use a smooth transition logistic function to test for equity market integration in a sample of Asia-Pacific countries. This allows us to gauge the speed at which a market is becoming integrated. Of the countries we examine we find that Thailand has the fastest pace of global integration. When we examine the extent to which local integration is taking place, we find that Singapore is experiencing the fastest rise in market integration.     

The value relevance of disclosure: Evidence from the emerging capital market of Egypt

This study examines the value of voluntary and mandatory disclosure in a market that applies International Accounting Standards (IAS) with limited penalties for non compliance. The lack of enforcement creates an element of choice in the level of mandatory disclosure by companies. Using panel-data analysis, our empirical results show that, after controlling for factors such as asset size and profitability, mandatory disclosure has a highly significant but negative relationship with firm value. This result, although puzzling from a traditional perspective, is consistent with the predictions of analytical accounting models, which emphasize the complex interplay of factors determining disclosure effects. Our results also show that voluntary disclosure has a positive but insignificant association with firm value. This lack of statistical significance supports the view that there is a complex interplay of different factors determining the relationship between disclosure and firm value.     

Short selling and the independence of business-related analysts: Evidence from an emerging market

This paper investigates whether short-sale deregulation improves analysts' independence in an emerging market where conventional mechanisms mitigating conflicts of interest are either ineffective or absent. Short selling reduces the effectiveness of analysts' favourable opinions in creating or sustaining overvalued stock prices, thus decreasing the incentives of institutional clients of brokerages to exert pressure on related analysts to initiate coverage and issue biased opinions. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find strong evidence that stocks that are eligible for short sales experience a greater reduction in coverage by related analysts than stocks that are ineligible for short sales. When covered firms become eligible for short sales, the quality of forecasts and recommendations issued by related analysts improves considerably. Further analyses show that shortable firms with a significant reduction in related analysts' coverage are more likely to underperform and to experience stock price crashes in the future. Altogether, our results are consistent with short selling effectively restoring related analysts' independence in emerging markets.     

Corporate responsibility towards employees and innovation: Evidence from an emerging market

Against a background of rising labor costs and the need to build a harmonious labor–capital relationship in China, this paper focuses on non-pecuniary incentives for employees and discusses the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards employees on innovation performance. The empirical results show that CSR towards employees significantly promotes corporate innovation, and that this effect remains robust after accounting for alternative proxies and endogeneity issues. In addition, the positive effect of CSR towards employees on innovation is more significant for firms in high-tech industries, with high levels of R&D inputs and high valuation of employee collaboration. Further analysis indicates that CSR towards employees does not promote R&D investment, but does significantly improve innovation efficiency and the marginal output of R&D investment and reduces the turnover rate of management-level staff with production and R&D backgrounds, which is conducive to stability of the innovation team. In addition, this paper also finds that for companies with high R&D expenditures, CSR towards employees significantly eases the sensitivity between executive turnover and performance, which helps executives resist pressure arising from a decline in short-term performance. The findings of this paper have implications for improving labor–capital relations and enhancing firm innovation capabilities.     

The conservatism bias in an emerging stock market: Evidence from Taiwan

Behavioral theories predict that investors underreact to earnings announcements stemming from the conservatism bias and overreact to a string of earnings news due to representativeness heuristic. This paper thus examines trading strategies of buying past high EPS growth stocks and selling past low EPS growth stocks over 4 to 20 quarters. The results generally support conservative reactions in the medium-term horizon, but provide little support for the over-use of representativeness heuristic on the long-term horizon. Moreover, we find that investors react differently to the consistency sequences of the two extreme earnings growth portfolios.     

The transmission of market shocks and bilateral linkages: Evidence from emerging economies

The linkage between emerging and developed economies spans beyond the usual trade in goods and services. Underlying trade is the flow of capital for foreign direct investment and for speculation in markets, which renders emerging economies vulnerable to shocks from the developed world. As such, equity return volatility in emerging markets is partly attributable to this dependence. To gauge the importance of bilateral economic and cultural factors in driving economic integration, we adopt a two-step process. First, we use Diebold and Yilmaz's spillover index methodology to extract spillover indices representative of the return volatility spillover effects of the United States, the developed portion of the Euro area, and Japan on financial markets in Asia, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Eastern and Central Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Second, we test whether these indices are governed by economic and cultural factors. Our results show that the spillover effects vary across markets and that a strong correlation exists with the volume of trade, security investment, common language, distance, and market capitalization.     

On emerging stock market contagion: The Baltic region

This study provides new evidence on emerging stock market contagion during the Global Financial crisis (GFC) and the Euro zone Sovereign Debt Crisis (ESDC). Focusing on the three emerging Baltic markets and developed European markets, proxied by the EUROSTOXX50 stock index, we explore asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation dynamics across stable and crisis periods. Empirical evidence indicates a diverse contagion pattern for the Baltic region across the two crises. Latvia and Lithuania were contagious during the GFC, while they were insulated from the adverse effects of the ESDC. On the other hand, Estonia decoupled from the negative consequences during the global turmoil period, but recoupled during the ESDC. The results could be attributed to financial and macroeconomic characteristics of the Baltic countries before and after the turmoil periods and the introduction time of the Euro as a national currency.     

Bilateral investment treaties and foreign direct investment: Evidence from emerging market firms

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) help developing countries attract foreign direct investment (FDI) from developed countries. However, whether BITs matter for emerging market firms’ (EMFs) FDI is unclear. This paper investigates how BITs affect EMFs’ FDI locations using conditional logit models with firm-level panel data from 2003 to 2015. The results show that BITs can help host countries attract FDI from emerging market countries. BITs work alongside good institutions to increase the attractiveness of FDI, irrespective of a host country being developed or not.     

High-speed rail construction and labor investment efficiency: Evidence from an emerging market

This study investigates the association between high-speed rail (HSR) construction and labor investment efficiency. Using unique hand-collected data on HSR construction over the period 2008–2019, we find that HSR construction can significantly decrease inefficient labor investment in China. In addition, we find that this negative relationship is (a) strong in state-owned companies and in firms located in big cities and (b) weak in financially constrained firms and in firms located in areas with a strong religious atmosphere. Consistent with the theoretical prediction, we find that the HSR construction mitigates inefficient labor investment by reducing information asymmetry between managers and investors and enhancing labor mobility. Overall, our findings are robust to alternative measurements, additional controls, fixed effects, and endogeneity concerns. Our findings have implications for firms’ top management to make strategic decisions and for government’s bodies/policymakers in relevance to HSR investment decisions.     

The effect of banking market structure on the lending channel: Evidence from emerging markets

This paper analyses the extent to which the level of bank competition influences monetary policy transmission. Using a large panel dataset of 978 banks from 55 countries, and employing the Lerner index model as a measure of market structure, our results show that an increase in banking sector competition weakens the effectiveness of monetary policy on bank lending. The findings are robust to a broad array of sensitivity checks including control of alternative measurements of the Lerner index, different samples and different methodological specifications. By extension, these results have important policy implications for regulators in assessing the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission mechanisms.     

Determinants and consequences of voluntary disclosure in an emerging market: Evidence from China

In this paper we examine empirically the determinants of voluntary disclosure in the annual reports of Chinese listed firms that issue both domestic and foreign shares and determine if the cost of debt capital is related to the extent of voluntary disclosure. We find the level of voluntary disclosure is positively related to the proportion of state ownership, foreign ownership, firm performance measured by return on equity, and reputation of the engaged auditor. There is no evidence, however, that companies benefit from extensive voluntary disclosure by having a lower cost of debt capital.     

Equity market integration in the Asia Pacific region: Evidence from discount factors

The paper investigates stock market integration among 10 economies in the Asia Pacific region over the period April to May 2006 based on a recently developed technique that relies on estimating expected discount rates; see [Flood and Rose, 2005a] and [Flood and Rose, 2005b]. The results show a limited but varying degree of stock market integration among the 10 economies. Membership in a formal economic organization does not seem to affect the degree of integration.