Background: Recent business paper articles observe that stocks soar when there is a change in ownership. The clothing company JC climbed 26% when it was announced Torsten Jansson had increased his holdings. Daydream, a computer game developer, followed this trend increasing its market value by 17% on the news that TA Capital had increased its hold-ings. In these examples, the market learned of the changes in ownership through a press release created by the acquiring entity. These pieces of news, also known as ownership disclosures, is the target of this thesis. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether ownership disclosures result in abnormal stock price changes. Furthermore, the aim is to find out if there are any differ-ences in returns depending on who announced the ownership disclosure. In order to fulfil this purpose, a quantitative approach was used. Method: A random sample of 160 ownership disclosures is gathered. 77 of these are classified as passive- and 83 as active investors. For each of these pieces of news, 183 days of historical stock price data is retrieved. This data is then parsed through the market model event-study framework. Findings: Graphically analyzing the whole sample indicates that the market is not efficient in its strong form. The same is true when dividing the sample into passive- and active investors. Statistically, an abnormal return is confirmed for the active investors, but not for the whole sample or the passive investors. Conclusion: By looking at the price change effects of ownership disclosures, the Stockholm Stock Exchange O-list is determined to be efficient at the semi-strong level. The anomaly caused by active investors leads to the possibility of making a profit of 2.70% between day -1 and day +1 relative to the day of the ownership disclosure being sent out. It should be noted, though, that transaction costs and taxes are not taken into consideration.

No description available.

This study encompasses an examination of the awards of the Iran-U. S. Claims Tribunal in cases of expropriation and nationalization of Foreign Investment. The question of compensation for expropriation and nationalization of alien property has always been a controversial issue in the relationship between the foreign investors and investees particularly in the third world countries. This question has been a major point of discussion in international law as well. The Iran-U. S. Claims Tribunal is the most recent body to deal with the question of expropriation; nationalization and compensation. In this study I have attempted to see what the awards of the Tribunal have contributed to the resolution of the controversial question of compensation for expropriation and nationalization. In 1982 when the Tribunal began work, the International law standard to be applied in determining compensation in cases of expropriation and nationalization was a controversial issue. The period from 1982 onwards might be considered as a new era in international law. Thus to explore the present status of the international law of compensation the awards of the Tribunal have been examined. I have attempted to find out what standard of compensation has been applied in the awards of the Tribunal; what has been the governing law; what has been the context of that. law; and finally what have been the justifications' for the application of that law. These issues are discussed within eight chapters. The ninth chapter, however, reviews the findings of the study and contains some general conclusions. The final assessment of this study is that, the decisions of the Tribunal have been given against a background of the increasing recognition of the need for foreign investment in the developing countries and have made an important contribution to the law in this field.

This thesis investigates key issues concerning how active equity fund managers add value: measuring alpha (Chapter 3), generating alpha (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) and transaction cost minimisation (Chapter 7). Chapter 3 proposes important methodological adjustments to the widely adopted benchmarking methodology of Daniel, Grinblatt, Titman and Wermers (1997). Applying this modified benchmark to a sample of active funds and simulated passive portfolios that mimic fund manager style characteristics, statistically lower tracking error is documented, compared with using the standard methodology. These findings suggest that improved specifications of characteristic benchmarks represent better methods in accurately quantifying fund manager skill. Chapter 4 examines a portfolio strategy which selects stocks using the undisclosed monthly holdings of Australian active funds. When considering a large range of strategies incorporating portfolio holdings information, the top performing strategies are robust to data-snooping and are economically and statistically significant when incorporating transaction costs. Accounting for look-ahead bias in the formation of a strategy, statistically significant alpha of at least 6.88 percent per year is found when following the best performing strategy holding 20 stocks or more in the previous month. Chapter 5 examines the relation of active equity fund managers location proximity to a stock??s corporate headquarter using portfolio holdings data. Contrary to much international research, this study reveals evidence inconsistent with a location advantage for Melbourne and Sydney-based funds. Chapter 6 examines retail investor trading on the Australian Stock Exchange. The performance of retail investors is highly heterogeneous: discount (non-discount) retail brokerage investors lose -0.59 (-0.05) percent intraday and experience negative (positive) returns over the subsequent year. These findings are inconsistent with retail investors exerting price pressure or providing liquidity to institutions. Chapter 7 examines whether equity fund managers use multiple brokers in a trade package in order to lower their price impact and brokerage costs. Using the daily trades of funds, multiple broker trades are not found to have lower costs compared to a single broker, even when controlling for the informativeness of the trade package and potential endogeneity. These findings suggest that fund managers do not lower their costs when using multiple brokers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, May 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 1, 2009). "College of Business." Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis consists of three essays and empirically studies the behaviour of emerging and frontier stock markets against instability in the commodity and international financial markets. The first essay considers symmetric and asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH models to examine the correlations between the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) stock markets and the Brent and OPEC crude oil price indices and to gauge the oil shocks effect on the dynamics of the GCC stock markets. The analysis uses weekly data covering the period December 31st, 2003 to December 27th, 2012. The results show that: (i) two of the GCC stock markets are asymmetrically correlated with both the Brent and OPEC crude oil price indices and only two are symmetrically correlated with Brent oil; (ii) all the GCC stock markets exhibit positive and symmetric conditional correlations overtime and these correlations are more pronounced during periods of high oil price fluctuations. The second essay investigates the contagion effect and volatility spillovers from the U.S. financial, the Dubai and the European debt crises to the GCC stock markets, with particular focus on financial and non-financial sectors. It uses weekly data for the period December 31st, 2003 to January 28th, 2015 and applies GARCH models and indicators of crisis. The empirical results show that: i) contagion effects are present on some of the GCC stock markets and are more pronounced during the U.S. financial and Dubai debt crises, with a larger impact on financial sectors; ii) there is significant evidence of volatility spillovers from the financial sectors of the U.S., European and Dubai stock markets to some of the GCC sectors considered, even though spillovers are rather weak in magnitude. The last essay investigates the extent to which the GCC stock markets are correlated and integrated with those of the Asian countries. The analysis is carried out using the Johansen cointegration approach, the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) GARCH model, and a standard correlation analysis based on a rolling window estimation scheme. The sample period of the analysis spans from December 31st, 2003 to September 30th, 2015. The empirical analysis offers three main results. First, there is a relatively moderate evidence of cointegration among some of the GCC and Asian stock markets particularly with of those of strong economic linkages among them. Second, evidence of time-varying correlation is found in some cases, while not large in magnitude, and shocks to volatility are highly persistence. Third, stock returns show a common trend exists, only during the global financial crisis.

M.Comm. / Many people work for their money but do not know how to make their money work for them. The subject of investment is foreign and even daunting to many people that can potentially benefit from investing their money wisely. While earning money is something most people are actively focussed on through the application of their skills, talents and gained knowledge, not many people are so focused on or adept at the management of their money after they earned it. Such individuals include professionals like engineers, lawyers, doctors, accountants as well as managers, entrepreneurs or tradesmen. In actual fact it includes all people that have not been specifically trained or exposed to the selection and management of investments. It is for this reason that a decision framework to aid such non specialist investors in their investment decisions have been conceptualised. This study will demystify general considerations related to investments and investment management and to open the field of investment management to non specialist investors by providing them with an investment selection decision framework. The study conducted thorough research into the different investment types available as well as the considerations that go with the subject of investment and investment management. The research findings clarify why people need to invest their money, the options that exist to choose from, the distinguishing features and considerations of investments options, how to gain access to different investment options and also who the stakeholders in the investment industry are. The decision support framework combines the learnings from the research into a simple to use tool whereby potential investors are guided through structured questions to derive at a list of investment types that most likely will meet their investment needs and preferences.

This dissertation analyzes the interaction between individuals and institutions, with a particular focus on how individuals make economic decisions within legal frameworks. It uses quasi-natural experiments and descriptive analyses to provide direct empirical evidence on these decisions. Chapter 1 investigates the extent to which mutual funds represent individual investors. Although mutual funds have widely varying voting patterns and predictable ideological disagreements, little is known about whether their underlying investors have similar preferences or sort by ideology into funds. I provide the first systematic documentation comparing the voting preferences of individual investors in the United States to those of the mutual funds they invest in. I find that individual investors are highly ideological in their voting and that Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) funds have an ideologically distinct shareholder base of individual investors whose preferences are reflected in the votes of the ESG funds. ESG funds are unique in this respect; although funds have distinct voting ideologies, as do individual investors, a mutual fund’s voting choices generally have little or no relationship with those of its underlying investors. Chapter 2 —joint work with Alon Brav and Matthew Cain— studies retail shareholder voting using a nearly comprehensive sample of U.S. ownership and voting records over the period 2015–2017. Analyzing turnout within a rational choice framework, we find that participation increases with ownership and expected benefits from winning and decreases with higher costs of participation. Even shareholders with negligible likelihood of affecting the outcome have non-zero turnout, consistent with consumption benefits from voting. Conditional on participation, retail shareholders punish the management of poorly performing firms and are more likely to exit the firm after voting against incumbent management. We show that retail voting decisions are impactful, altering proposal outcomes as frequently as those of the “Big Three” institutional investors. Overall, our evidence provides support for the idea that retail shareholders utilize their voting power as a means to monitor firms and communicate with incumbent boards and managements. Chapter 3 studies the effects of a selective tax on contract design and tax timing. Taxation affects income via both a compensation contract response and a worker response. I show that executive contracts adjust to a tax on severances, and executives shift their taxable income timing in response to the interaction of tax and contract. In particular, “golden parachute” severances tend to bunch at a threshold (tied to taxable income) where the tax rate discontinuously increases, and CEOs exercise stock options in bulk to raise their taxable income and boost their threshold. Identification comes from a bunching analysis exploiting a discontinuous change in exercise incentives over time and variation across CEOs in contract incentives and deal timing. The chapter demonstrates the role of contract structure in tax avoidance and additionally shows how contract structure affects worker behavior.

Thesis advisor: Jeffrey Pontiff / My thesis contains four essays on the pricing of financial assets and the role of non-professional investors. The first two essays describe the legal framework governing Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and the liquidity transformation functions of ETFs. The third essay examines how trading by nine different types of market participants are related to characteristics that have previously documented to predict the cross-section of equity returns. The fourth and final essay examines whether and how orders originating from retail brokerages respond to analyst recommendations. In my first essay, I describe the legal framework that governs ETFs and theoretical benefits of the ETF security design relative to two other popular investment management security structures: open-end and close-end mutual funds. To do so, I briefly describe the history of the modern investment management industry. I describe the role of Authorized Participants (APs), the main security design innovation of ETFs, and highlight the key theoretical differences between the three classes of funds. Lastly, I describe SEC rulemaking that governs the behavior of ETF Managers and their APs. In the second essay, I document a hidden but substantial cost associated with the liquidity transformation that corporate bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs) provide. When creating new shares, authorized participants (APs) deliver a subset of the portfolio of bonds that underlie a corporate bond ETF. This subset contains bonds that realize low future returns, reducing ETF performance by 48 basis points per annum. This loss in performance cannot be attributed to forgone compensation for risk or illiquidity, but instead results from APs utilizing information regarding future changes in net asset values to strategically deliver bonds when those bonds are expected to realize poor performance in the near future. My third essay is joint work with Jeff Pontiff and David McLean. We provide the most comprehensive study of market participation to date. We assess the informativeness of 9 different participants’ trades, and how each participant’s trades relate to 130 different variables that together reflect the cross-section of expected stock returns. Firms and short sellers tend to be the smart money—both sell stocks with low expected returns, and their trades predict returns in the intended direction. Firms, however, also seem to possess private information, while short sellers do not. Retail investors buy (sell) stocks with low (high) expected returns and their trades predict returns opposite to the intended direction. All 6 types of institutional investors are weighted towards stocks with low expected returns, but none of their trades robustly predict returns. My fourth essay is joint work with Jeff Pontiff and David McLean. We ask whether retail investors are responsive to analysts’ revisions. We consider revisions in recommendations, price targets, and EPS forecasts, all of which predict returns. Revisions in recommendations and price targets portend greater retail trading in the direction of the revision. The effects are stronger for All-Star Analysts’ revisions, and retail investors also respond to All-Star’s revisions in EPS forecasts. Retail investors trade in anticipation of revisions in price targets and recommendations, consistent with analysts or brokers “tipping” some retail investors. Retail trades earn higher returns when aligned with analysts’ revision. The results show that retail investors are one channel through which analysts’ information gets into prices. Our findings also support the idea that spikes in retail trading reflect informed trading, some of which is informed by analysts. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.