Corporate Ownership Structure and the Informativeness of Accounting Earnings in East Asia

This study examines the relations between earnings informativeness, measured by the earnings-return relation, and the ownership structure of 977 companies in seven East Asian economies. Our results are consistent with two complementary explanations. First, concentrated ownership and the associated pyramidal and cross-holding structures create agency conflicts between controlling owners and outside investors. Consequently, controlling owners are perceived to report accounting information for self-interested purposes, causing the reported earnings to lose credibility to outside investors. Second, concentrated ownership is associated with low earnings informativeness as ownership concentration prevents leakage of proprietary information about the firms' rent-seeking activities, which are prevalent and profitable in East Asia.Ownership concentration, Transparency, Earnings informativeness, Emerging markets

The Asian crisis and the exposure of large U.S. firms

A deep financial and economic crisis ravaged many Asian nations during 1997 and 1998. In this article, William Emmons and Frank Schmid examine the impact of the crisis on corporate risk for a subset of large U.S. firms that are included in the S&P 100 stock-market index. They find that the Asian crisis changed many of these firms' exposure to stock-market movements-that is, their "betas" or sensitivity to stock-market risk. In particular, the extent of a firm's sales exposure to Asia appears to be an important link through which the crisis affected beta. This effect is amplified by greater financial leverage.Financial crises - Asia ; Stock - Prices

Stock Market Calendar Anomalies: Evidence from ASEAN-5 Stock Markets

To challenge the appropriateness of the theory of the weak-form market efficiency, this study examines the day-of-the-week effect and the twist-of-the-Monday effect for the ASEAN – 5 stock markets for the period June 10, 2002 through August 21, 2009. Our Kruskal-Wallis statistic test finds support for the day-of-the-week effect in Malaysia and Thailand stock markets. In addition, the Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test shows that Monday has significantly lower returns compared to Thursday and Friday returns in Malaysian stock market. On the other hand, Friday has the highest returns in a week and this is significantly different compared with other days in Thailand stock market. This study also found evidence on the twist-of-the-Monday effect, where returns on Mondays are influenced by the previous week's returns in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines stock markets.Calendar Anomalies, Day-of-the-week, Twist-of-the-Monday, Non-parametric test

The Halloween Indicator is More a Treat than a Trick

This paper uses stock market returns (2007-2015) and confirms the existence of Halloween effect anomaly after the 2008 financial crisis. Findings suggest that the Halloween effect can still be observed in 34 out of the 35 countries. A more aggressive trading strategy of shorting the market during summer and taking a long position in winter yields 4.77% more than the buy-and-hold strategy. A new explanation is offered for the persistence of the Halloween effect. A positive feedback between investors’ belief and behavior causes the market to underperform in the summer and recover in the winter, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy

Sterilization, monetary policy, and global financial integration

This paper investigates the changing pattern and efficacy of sterilization within emerging market countries as they liberalize markets and integrate with the world economy. We estimate the marginal propensity to sterilize foreign asset accumulation associated with net balance of payments inflows, across countries and over time. We find that the extent of sterilization of foreign reserve inflows has risen in recent years to varying degrees in Asia as well as in Latin America, consistent with greater concerns about the potential inflationary impact of reserve inflows. We also find that sterilization depends on the composition of balance of payments inflows.Emerging markets ; Bank reserves ; International finance

Evidence of the weekday effect anomaly in the Chinese stock market

The weekday effect anomaly is considered as a market pricing anomaly which refers to some regularities in the rates of return during the week and thus, is a category of calendar anomalies. This article is focused on the Chinese stock market and its main objective is to assess the presence of the day of the week effect anomaly through examining the SSE and SZSE Composite Indexes. In this study, it is firstly examined whether there are significant differences between Monday and other weekday daily returns using the tests of differences between two means. The following empirical study is focused on the relationship between daily returns and weekdays, which is conducted using binary logistic regression analysis. The overall results indicate that both indexes show the presence of the day of the week effect, and the effect is significantly greater in the Shenzhen stock exchange. In both markets, Thursday daily returns significantly differ from other daily returns, which suggests a specific day of the week effect in the Chinese stock markets

Are early market indicators of financial deterioration accurate for Too Big To Fail banks? Evidence from East Asia

This paper investigates whether market information is reliable to predict financial deterioration of large Too Big To Fail banks in Asia. A stepwise logit model is first estimated to isolate the optimal set of accounting indicators to predict rating downgrades. The model is then extended to assess the added value of market indicators and to test for the possible presence of a Too Big To Fail effect. While some results show that market indicators bring in additional information in the prediction process, there is consistent evidence of a Too Big To Fail effect.Bank, Bank Failure, Bank Risk, East Asia

Big Questions, Little Answers: Terrorism Activity, Investor Sentiment and Stock Returns

Motivated by the investor sentiment literature and assuming that terrorist activity influences investor mood the paper explores whether terrorism exerts a significant negative impact on daily stock market returns for a sample of 22 countries. The employed empirical specifications are based on flexible versions of the World CAPM allowing for autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity. The results suggest that terrorist activity leads to significantly lower returns on the day of terrorist attack occurrence. In addition, the negative effect of terrorist activity is substantially amplified as the level of psychosocial effects increases. On the one hand this evidence sheds light to the underlying mechanism via which terrorism affects stock markets while on the other hand provides further empirical support for the sentiment effect.Sentiment, Terrorism, Stock Market, Panel, Pooled Panel ARCH