Commemorating the 50‐Year Anniversary of Ball and Brown (1968): The Evolution of Capital Market Research over the Past 50 Years

We commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ball and Brown [1968] by chronicling its impact on capital market research in accounting. We trace the evolution of various research paths that post–Ball and Brown [1968] researchers took as they sought to build on the foundation laid by Ball and Brown [1968] to create a body of research on the usefulness, timeliness, and other properties of accounting numbers. We discuss how those paths often link back to the groundwork laid and questions originally posed in Ball and Brown [1968].     

Semi‐efficient valuations and put‐call parity

We propose an approach to the valuation of payoffs in general semimartingale models of financial markets where prices are nonnegative. Each asset price can hit 0; we only exclude that this ever happens simultaneously for all assets. We start from two simple, economically motivated axioms, namely, absence of arbitrage (in the sense of NUPBR) and absence of relative arbitrage among all buy‐and‐hold strategies (called static efficiency). A valuation process for a payoff is then called semi‐efficient consistent if the financial market enlarged by that process still satisfies this combination of properties. It turns out that this approach lies in the middle between the extremes of valuing by risk‐neutral expectation and valuing by absence of arbitrage alone. We show that this always yields put‐call parity, although put and call values themselves can be nonunique, even for complete markets. We provide general formulas for put and call values in complete markets and show that these are symmetric and that both contain three terms in general. We also show that our approach recovers all the put‐call parity respecting valuation formulas in the classic theory as special cases, and we explain when and how the different terms in the put and call valuation formulas disappear or simplify. Along the way, we also define and characterize completeness for general semimartingale financial markets and connect this to the classic theory.     

Regulatory reform and market efficiency: The case of Indian agricultural commodity futures markets

We present the results of two efficiency measures that include intraday return predictability measure based on order imbalance and measures of several variance ratio tests on intraday subsamples of nine major Indian agricultural commodity futures (castor seed, cotton oil cake, rape mustard seed, soybean, refined soya oil, crude palm oil, jeera, chana, and turmeric) quoted in the National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX). We perform the efficiency measures on five subsamples with holding periods of 5, 10, 15, 30, and 60 min over two sample periods following the announcement of the merger between the Forward Market Commission (FMC) and Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI). We compare results of tests of weak-form market efficiency of futures markets between two periods (pre-merger period and post-merger period). Our results confirm that Indian agricultural commodity futures markets continue to remain inefficient in the short-term during both pre-merger and post-merger periods. Based on these findings, it is likely that profitable trading strategies in the short intraday intervals will be available for traders and market participants during post-merger period. Thus, regulators must focus more on policy initiative so as to enhance market quality in order to address such inefficiencies in Indian commodity futures markets.     

Multi-factor Risk-return Relationships

This paper derives three multi-factor risk-return relationships each of which employs macro-economic variables in presenting the underlying factors that influence security returns. The first relationship holds if the underlying portfolio lies on the expected return-standard deviation efficient frontier, the second is valid when the underlying portfolio lies inside the efficient frontier and the third characterises security markets in which no arbitrage opportunities are present. An attempt is also made to appraise critically previous multi-factor risk-return relationships which rely on an expected return-standard deviation approach.     

Efficiency of the office properties market

This paper reports the results of an efficient markets test of the Dallas-Fort Worth office properties market. ARIMA models using a comprehensive data set did not produce superior forecasts. The results provide further evidence of the efficiency of real estate markets.     

On statistical inference on the mean-variance efficient set

A proof of the asymptotic distribution of the estimated mean-variance frontier is given. A Bayesian prediction interval is derived for the capital asset pricing model. Numerical illustrations show that the prediction intervals for the CAPM are smaller than those for the constant mean model, if the fit of the CAPM is better than that of the constant mean model.     

经济新闻自由度与资本市场的有效性

从金融经济学"效率市场假说"的理论与实证研究结果角度分析经济新闻自由对于金融市场发展的影响后认为,经济新闻自由是实现效率市场的宏观机制之一;只有充分的经济新闻自由,信息才能迅速而充分地扩散到市场,并被包括到资产的价格中,从而实现效率市场,促进资本市场的发展。利用世界银行各国股市市值数据与"自由之家"对各国新闻自由度的评定数据进行的统计分析表明,经济新闻自由与股市市值之间具有显著的正相关性。     

A Market Efficiency Comparison of Islamic and Non-Islamic Stock Indices

This article examines the martingale difference hypothesis (MDH) and the random walk hypothesis (RWH) for nine conventional and nine Islamic stock indices: Asia-Pacific, Canadian, Developed Country, Emerging, European, Global, Japanese, UK, and United States. It investigates whether Islamic stock indices are more, less, or as efficient as their conventional counterparts. We test four sub-periods of bullish and bearish stock markets, together with the financial meltdown and its recovery, over the period 1997–2012. We use the Escanciano and Lobato’s (2009) automatic portmanteau test (AQ) and Deo’s (2000) test for the MDH. We also apply the automatic variance ratio test (AVR) developed by Choi (1999) and Kim (2009) for the RWH. Over the period from 1997 to 2012, we find that three conventional indices (Europe, Japan, and UK) are efficient, but that none of the Islamic indices are efficient in these markets. During the recent financial crisis, our results indicate slightly more efficiency for the Islamic indices than their conventional counterparts. Our study finds that overall the conventional indices are more efficient than their Islamic counterparts. Nevertheless, during periods of general downturns the Islamic indices have shown the same level of efficiency as their counterparts. Furthermore, it appears that during the last two sub-periods under study, the Islamic indices have moved toward efficiency, displaying the same level of efficiency as their counterparts.     

When unionisation is profitable for firms in network industries

In an industry characterised by the presence of network effects, this paper investigates a duopolistic game in which firms may choose whether to bargain over wages and employment with unions or to face a competitive labour market (i.e., without unions). If unions are sufficiently wage‐sensitive, it is shown that the presence of sufficiently large network effects makes unionisation the Pareto efficient sub‐game perfect Nash equilibrium outcome for firms.     

我国上市公司资产出售的公告效应研究

文章以1999-2004年间185家企业226次资产出售事件为样本,检验了我国上市公司资产出售的公告效应,并对2008-2009年间我国上市公司的资产出售进行了稳健性检验.研究发现,我国企业的资产出售具有明显的年中和年末效应；企业股价对资产出售的反应显著为正,尤其是在(-2,0)区间内,资产出售的公告效应得到集中释放.对资产出售公告效应影响因素的检验表明,我国上市公司的资产出售更加符合有效配置假说,融资假说不能解释这种行为.