EXCHANGE LISTING AND STOCK LIQUIDITY

Two measures are used to estimate the liquidity of stocks that switch their places of trading (from OTC to NYSE, from OTC to AMEX, and from AMEX to NYSE). Using an event-type methodology, results are obtained that indicate a decline in liquidity for stocks leaving the OTC market. Stocks switching from the AMEX to the NYSE experience an initial increase in liquidity, followed by a decline almost to previous levels.     

THE INFORMATIONAL VALUE OF LISTING ON THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE

In this paper, the authors test market reaction to the listing of a stock on the New York Stock Exchange independently from other attendant news and test the hypothesis that listing has different informational value for stocks that have performed differently in the prelisting period. Their findings support the argument that listing conveys positive information. Listing is observed to be of most value for firms with ambiguous earnings performance.     

BETA,SIZE, RISK,AND RETURN

We relate the cross‐section of stock returns to firm size, beta, and total risk. We find that as extreme monthly security returns are censored from the data, the significance level decreases rapidly for the size variable and increases for beta and total risk. An analysis of up and down markets reaffirms our findings. Consequently, average returns relate positively with beta, negatively with total risk, and not at all with firm size. We infer that investors willingly accept a lower average return on high‐total‐risk investments as the trade‐off for buying a chance at an extreme positive return. JEL classification: G1.     

DEBT REFUNDING AND SHAREHOLDER WEALTH: THE PRICE EFFECTS OF DEBT-FOR-DEBT EXCHANGE OFFER ANNOUNCEMENTS

This study examines the impact of debt refunding on common stock prices for a sample of 48 exchange offers announced from 1970 through 1981. Exchange offer announcements do not have a significant impact on average common stock returns but appear to produce idiosyncratic share price effects. Refunding-induced price effects were unrelated to several exchange offer characteristics including tax shield increases, exchange offer premia, and transaction costs of refunding. Common stock excess returns were negatively related to reductions in debt service payments and relaxation of dividend payment constraints. Thus, the evidence is consistent with theories predicting that certain debt refundings generate negative information-signaling price effects.     

DO FOREIGN INVESTORS PRICE FOREIGN EXCHANGE RISK DIFFERENTLY?

We test whether foreign investors price foreign exchange risk differently from local investors. Drawing from the closed‐end country fund literature, we argue that both differential access to information by foreign versus local investors and different sources of exchange risk that investors face (economic or translation exposure) will lead to different pricing of the exchange risk associated with American Depositary Receipt (ADR) investments. We apply a two‐step method to country portfolios of ADRs of Australia, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Our results show that foreign investors generally price exchange risk differently from local investors, and that the source and magnitude of differences in exchange risk pricing vary significantly across countries. Although significant differences in pricing exchange risk between foreign and local investors are observed for Australia, France, and Japan, no such pricing difference is noticed for the United Kingdom. Furthermore, the pricing differences observed for Australian and French ADRs are mainly attributed to the exchange risk of underlying share returns (economic exposure), whereas the pricing differences for Japanese ADRs are mainly attributed to the exchange risk associated with currency translation (translation exposure). We offer some explanations for our findings.     

BOND BETA AND DEFAULT RISK

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between bond betas and default risk. Previous studies conclude that there is an apparent lack of a significant and direct relationship and offer various explanations. This paper illustrates that beta is influenced by offsetting or conflicting factors that cause the relationship to be ambiguous. Empirical evidence confirms the explanation.     

GROUP EFFECTS AND BETA NONSTATIONARITY

Recent evidence indicates that while random diversification can lead to the elimination of the majority of systematic risk, the systematic selection of securities can result in significant group effects blocking this dissipation of unsystematic risk. The group effects associated with investment in growth, cyclical, stable and oil stocks found by Farrell and Martin and Klemkosky were reexamined while allowing for beta nonstationarity. It was found that the beta nonstationarity effect, while quite large for individual stocks and small portfolios tended diversify away quite quickly. It was further found that much of what has in the past been termed a group effect is actually the result of beta nonstationarity.     

PREDICTING NEXT TRADING DAY CLOSING PRICE OF QATAR EXCHANGE INDEX USING TECHNICAL INDICATORS AND ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Accurate prediction of stock market price is of great importance to many stakeholders. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have shown robust capability in predicting stock price return, future stock price and the direction of stock market movement. The major aim of this study is to predict the next trading day closing price of the Qatar Exchange (QE) Index using historical data from 3 January 2010 to 31 December 2012. A multilayer perceptron ANN architecture was used as a prediction model with 10 market technical indicators as input variables. The experimental results indicate that ANNs are an effective modelling technique for predicting the QE Index with high accuracy, outperforming the well‐established autoregressive integrated moving average models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use ANNs to predict the QE Index, and its performance results are comparable to, and sometimes better than, many stock market predictions reported in the literature. The ANN model also revealed that the weighted and simple moving averages are the most important technical indicators in predicting the QE Index, and the accumulation/distribution oscillator is the least important such indicator. The analysis results also indicated that the ANNs are resilient to stock market volatility. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

VARIANCE,RETURN, AND HIGH-LOW PRICE SPREADS

We report three new findings that rely upon the high-low price range as an estimate of stock return variance. The predictability of variance is associated with persistence in high prices and with correlated shocks to high and low prices. Excess stock returns are positively related to anticipated variance and inversely related to unanticipated variance. Lagged squared residuals in GARCH(1,1) models have no incremental explanatory power in the presence of forecasts of conditional volatility generated from high-low price spread models.     

ARE PRICE LIMITS EFFECTIVE? EVIDENCE FROM THE ISTANBUL STOCK EXCHANGE

There is considerable discussion about controlling volatility by imposing price limits on asset prices. We examine the effects of price limits on a stock market by testing the volatility spillover, delayed price discovery, and trading interference hypotheses in a leading emerging market, the Istanbul Stock Exchange, which has a unique market microstructure as related to price limits. Our results support the volatility spillover, delayed price discovery, and trading interference hypotheses. We also show price locks at limits provide significantly stronger evidence regarding the effects of price limits than limit moves only. Finally, price limits have a significant effect on the stock market, casting doubt on their effectiveness.