Three Essays on Financial Markets

This dissertation consists of three essays that address recent topics in financial markets that concern for scholars, policymakers, and investors. The first essay examines the benefits of international diversification for US investors, while accounting for market development, corporate governance, market cap effects, and structural change across countries over period August 1996 –July 2013. Improved risk adjusted returns are obtained from a diversified portfolio consisting of a mix of developed and emerging countries. Additionally, we find that diversification benefits are not significant for most of the small-cap foreign assets when an investor already holds position in corresponding countries large-cap assets. Diversification benefits based on the governance effectiveness of a country’s companies are not ubiquitous. We find that economically significant improvements in risk-return performance can be attained by adding large caps of developed countries with high and low overall Governance Metrics International (GMI) ratings and large and small caps of emerging countries with low overall GMI ratings to the investment universe containing the assets of common law developed countries. However, diversification benefits are economically significant only for large and small caps of low GMI emerging countries when short selling is not allowed. The second essay looks at the market impact of recent regulatory changes in Canada that provide for trading halts on individual stocks that experience large upside or downside movements. The focus is on all stocks traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange since the inception of the single stock circuit breaker rule (SSCB) in February 2012, to replace the short-sale uptick rule. The results support pricing efficiency: material information that caused the circuit breaker is incorporated in stock prices on the day of the halt (neither overreaction nor underreaction), with no decline in market liquidity. Using trade-by-trade data constructed on 5-minute trading intervals, we refine the daily results, and show that shocks in realized volatility are focused in the ten-minute trading interval surrounding the halts. While circuit breakers provide a limited “safety net” for investors when their stocks are subject to severe volatility, they do not provide for a quick turnaround for stocks experiencing severe price decline events. The last essay re-examines the historical vs implied volatility spread anomaly, reported by Goyal and Saretto (2009) using a second-order stochastic dominance (SSD) criterion. The approach incorporates transaction frictions, and is robust to model specification problems, return distributions, as well as preferences. It is found that option trading frictions such as cash collateral requirements and option trading costs significantly reduce but do not eliminate returns to a long-short straddle trading strategy pre-2006 period. However, the anomaly disappears after 2006, consistent with market efficiency. The SSD test results confirm the findings