Stock Market Reaction to Catastrophic Shock: Evidence from Listed Pakistani Firms

This study examines the effect of the earthquake of October 8, 2005 on the price behaviour and activities of KSE. Sixty firms are selected from those listed on Karachi Stock Exchange, and the results are informative about the price behaviour of the stock market in response to unanticipated shock. The results reveal the fact that the earthquake had both a positive and a negative information content for KSE stocks. There is an increase in the return and volume of the cement, steel, food, and banking sectors, which indicates that investors have expectations of the upcoming demand of investment in these sectors. Furthermore, there is no significant increase in the volatility, because the investors seem certain about the future outlook and they take into account the March 2005 market crash. These findings support the fact that the stock market of Pakistan is reactive to unanticipated shocks and it takes no time to impact the market activities. The evidence also suggests that the Pakistani stock market is resilient, and that it recovered soon after the catastrophic shock.Catastrophic Shock, Market Model, GARCH Specification, Average Return, Market Volume, Market Volatility

Stock Market Reaction to Catastrophic Shock : Evidence from Listed Pakistani Firms

This study examines the effect of the earthquake of October 8, 2005 on the price behaviour and activities of KSE. Sixty firms are selected from those listed on Karachi Stock Exchange, and the results are informative about the price behaviour of the stock market in response to unanticipated shock. The results reveal the fact that the earthquake had both a positive and a negative information content for KSE stocks. There is an increase in the return and volume of the cement, steel, food, and banking sectors, which indicates that investors have expectations of the upcoming demand of investment in these sectors. Furthermore, there is no significant increase in the volatility, because the investors seem certain about the future outlook and they take into account the March 2005 market crash. These findings support the fact that the stock market of Pakistan is reactive to unanticipated shocks and it takes no time to impact the market activities. The evidence also suggests that the Pakistani stock market is resilient, and that it recovered soon after the catastrophic shock.Catastrophic Shock, Market Model, GARCH Specification, Average Return, Market Volume, Market Volatility

Privatization-Safe Transactional Memories

Transactional memory (TM) facilitates the development of concurrent applications by letting the programmer designate certain code blocks as atomic. Programmers using a TM often would like to access the same data both inside and outside transactions, and would prefer their programs to have a strongly atomic semantics, which allows transactions to be viewed as executing atomically with respect to non-transactional accesses. Since guaranteeing such semantics for arbitrary programs is prohibitively expensive, researchers have suggested guaranteeing it only for certain data-race free (DRF) programs, particularly those that follow the privatization idiom: from some point on, threads agree that a given object can be accessed non-transactionally. In this paper we show that a variant of Transactional DRF (TDRF) by Dalessandro et al. is appropriate for a class of privatization-safe TMs, which allow using privatization idioms. We prove that, if such a TM satisfies a condition we call privatization-safe opacity and a program using the TM is TDRF under strongly atomic semantics, then the program indeed has such semantics. We also present a method for proving privatization-safe opacity that reduces proving this generalization to proving the usual opacity, and apply the method to a TM based on two-phase locking and a privatization-safe version of TL2. Finally, we establish the inherent cost of privatization-safety: we prove that a TM cannot be progressive and have invisible reads if it guarantees strongly atomic semantics for TDRF programs

Relationship between Corporate Governance Indicators and Firm Value: A Case Study of Karachi Stock Exchange

We investigated whether differences in quality of firm-level corporate governance can explain the firm-level performance in a cross-section of companies listed at Karachi Stock Exchange. Therefore, we analysed the relationship between firm-level value as measured by Tobin’s Q and total Corporate Governance Index (CGI) and three sub-indices: Board, Shareholdings and Ownership, and Disclosures and Transparency for a sample of 50 firms. The results indicate that corporate governance does matter in Pakistan. However, not all elements of governance are important. The board composition and ownership and shareholdings enhance firm performance, whereas disclosure and transparency has no significant effect on firm performance. We point out that those adequate firm-level governance standards can not replace the solidity of the firm. The low production and bad management practices can not be covered with transparent disclosures and transparency standards.Corporate Governance; Firm Performance; Tobin’s Q; Agency Problem; Board Size; Shareholdings; Disclosures; Leverage Code of Corporate Governance

Corporate Governance in Pakistan : Corporate Valuation, Ownership and Financing

In this study the relationship between corporate governance and corporate valuation, ownership structure and need of external financing for the Karachi Stock Market is examined for the period 2003 to 2008. To measure the firm- level governance a rating system is used to evaluate the stringency of a set of governance practices and cover various governance categories : such as board composition, ownership and shareholdings and transparency, disclosure and auditing. The sample consists of 60 non-financial firms listed on Karachi Stock Exchange and comprises more than 80 percent of market capitalization at Karachi Stock Market in 2007. The results confirms the theoretical notion that firms with better investment opportunities and larger in size adopt better corporate governance practice. The proposition that ownership concentration is a response to poor legal protection is also validated by the results. The more investment opportunities lead to more concentration of ownership and the ownership concentration is significantly diluted as the firm size expands. The findings are consistent with theoretical argument claiming that family owners, foreign owners and bring better governance and monitoring practices which is consistent with agency theory. The results suggest that firms which need more equity financing practice good governance. The results show that firms with high growth and large in size are in more need of external finance. The relationship between external financing and ownership concentration is negative. The results reveal that the firms which practice good governance, with concentrated ownership, need more external finance which have more profitable investment opportunities and are larger in size are valued higher. The interaction term of any variable with law enforcement term are not significant in any model suggesting that firm performance is not affected by rule of law in countries where legal environment is weak. These results adds an important link to the explanation of the consequences weak legal environment for external financing, corporate valuation and corporate governance. The results show that Corporate Governance Code 2002 potentially improves the governance and decision making process of firms listed at KSE.Ownership Concentration, Corporate governance, firm performance, External Financing, panel data

The Relationship between Corporate Governance Indicators and Firm Value: A Case Study of Karachi Stock Exchange

We investigated whether differences in quality of firm-level corporate governance can explain the firm-level performance in a cross-section of companies listed at Karachi Stock Exchange. Therefore, we analysed the relationship between firm-level value as measured by Tobin’s Q and total Corporate Governance Index (CGI) and three sub-indices: Board, Shareholdings and Ownership, and Disclosures and Transparency for a sample of 50 firms. The results indicate that corporate governance does matter in Pakistan. However, not all elements of governance are important. The board composition and ownership and shareholdings enhance firm performance, whereas disclosure and transparency has no significant effect on firm performance. We point out that those adequate firm-level governance standards can not replace the solidity of the firm. The low production and bad management practicesCorporate Governance, Firm Performance, Tobin’s Q, Agency Problem, Board Size, Shareholdings, Disclosures, Leverage, Code of Corporate Governance

The Conditional Capital Asset Pricing Model: Evidence from Karachi Stock Exchange

This is an attempt to empirically investigate the risk and return relationship of individual stocks traded at Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE), the main equity market in Pakistan. The analysis is based on daily as well as monthly data of 49 companies and KSE 100 index is used as market factor covering the period from July 1993 to December 2004. The natural startingpoint of this study is to test the adequacy of the standard Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) of Sharpe (1964) and Lintner (1965). The empirical findings do not support the standard CAPM model as a model to explain assets pricing in Pakistani equity market. The critical condition of CAPM—that there is a positive trade-off between risk and return—is rejected and residual risk plays some role in pricing risky assets. This allows for the return distribution to vary over time. The empirical results of the conditional CAPM, with time variation in market risk and risk premium, are more supported by the KSE data, where lagged macroeconomic variables, mostly containing business cycle information, are used for conditioning information. The information set includes the first lag of the following business cycle variables: market return, call money rate, term structure, inflation rate, foreign exchange rate, growth in industrial production, growth in real consumption, and growth in oil prices. In a nutshell, the results confirm the hypothesis that risk premium is time-varying type in Pakistani stock market and it strengthens the notion that rational asset pricing is working, although inefficiencies are also present in unconditional and conditional settings. The observation is that the dynamic size and book-to-market value coefficient explain the cross-section of expected returns in a few sub-periods. The conditional approach to testing the CAPM and the three-factor CAPM shows that the asset prices relationship is better explained by accommodating business cycle variables as information set. The findings of the conditional three-factor CAPM also give support to the fact that time-varying firm attributes have only a limited role in Pakistani market to explain the asset price behaviour.Capital Asset Pricing Model, Fama-French Three Factor Model, Market Risk, Residual Risk, Size, Book-to-market Value, Information Set, Business Cycle Variables

The Response of Karachi Stock Exchange to Nuclear Detonation

Stock markets are highly reactive to internal and external developments. News of major events take no time to impact, the Stock Exchange that quite often serves as a barometer of the good and bad for the market. The importance of particular events and their effect on the stock market has been a subject of study in financial literature. Such studies attempt to assess the extent to which stock markets’ performance stray’s from the normal around the time of the occurrence of subject events. The stock market crash in the USA of October 1987 and related crash in the Far East later in January 1998 led to several studies of the event. On October 14, 1987, the US stock market began the steepest decline of its history, culminating in the crash of October 19, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points (22.6 percent). Certain aspects of the event of Black Monday as it is called emphasised the need for research to explore what fundamental economic factors triggered the large decline and the institutional and structural factors that were inherent in the trading strategies of investors. Michell and Netter (1989) have presented evidence that a tax bill containing anti takeover provision proposed by the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee of Oct. 13, 1987 was the economic event that triggered the October 19 crash. Other events and economic conditions during October 14–16 have been cited in the literature including higher than expected trade deficits, rising interest rate and increased worries about the government deficit and fear of inflation by many studies. Certain trading strategies such as index arbitrage and portfolio insurance has been cited by the Report of Presidential Task Force (1988). Roll (1988) has argued the crash did not begin in US since many other world markets experienced a severe decline on October 19 before US markets opened.

The Relationship between Corporate Governance Indicators and Firm Value : A Case Study of Karachi Stock Exchange

We investigated whether differences in quality of firm-level corporate governance can explain the firm-level performance in a cross-section of companies listed at Karachi Stock Exchange. Therefore, we analysed the relationship between firm-level value as measured by Tobins Q and total Corporate Governance Index (CGI) and three sub-indices : Board, Shareholdings and Ownership, and Disclosures and Transparency for a sample of 50 firms. The results indicate that corporate governance does matter in Pakistan. However, not all elements of governance are important. The board composition and ownership and shareholdings enhance firm performance, whereas disclosure and transparency has no significant effect on firm performance. We point out that those adequate firm-level governance standards can not replace the solidity of the firm. The low production and bad management practices can not be covered with transparent disclosures and transparency standards.Corporate governance, firm performance, Agency Problem, Board Size, Shareholdings, Disclosures, Leverage, Code of Corporate Governance