Baker and Wurgler (2002) proposed market timing theory and indicated the observed capital structures are the outcomes that managers timed the equity market and took advantages of timing when information asymmetry is low and stock price is high. But many scholars argue that Baker and Wurgler¡¦s timing proxy is noisy, this study attempts to use the concept of Huang and Ritter (2009) to test market timing effect on capital structure more directly by cost of equity. The cost of equity in this study is estimated by Fama and French three factors model with five-year rolling regression which is different from Huang and Ritter (2009). The empirical results show that publicly traded firms in Taiwan Stock Exchange from 1996 to 2007 tend to issue debt when the cost of equity is high and issue equity when the cost of equity is low which means the timing of financing behavior exists but it has no long-lasting effect on capital structure. Indicating that the observed capital structures of publicly traded firms in Taiwan Stock Exchange aren¡¦t the outcomes that managers timed the equity market which is not identical to the perspectives of Baker and Wurgler (2002) and the speed of adjustment of capital structure of publicly traded firms in Taiwan Stock Exchange is very fast.

The traditional fund performance-evaluating measures rely on historical returns; however, this return-based performance measures are demonstrated with less precision but more biases than the holding-based measures by many studies. Therefore, the paper uses both return-based measure and holding-based measure by Cohen et al (2005). The equity fund samples begin from January 2004 to December 2008 with monthly returns and seasonally holdings of equity funds. The purpose of the study is to compare the predicting ability and information-containing ability between the four models: CAPM alpha model, Fama & French alpha model, CAPM holding based alpha model, and Fama & French holding based alpha model. At the end, the study analyzes the stock selection ability of Taiwan equity funds with the model which has the best predicting and information-containing power. The result shows that the best predicting power models are Fama & French model and CAPM model. Also, the best information-containing models for predicting future returns are Fama & French model and CAPM model. Thus, the study uses both Fama & French model and CAPM model to analyze the stock-picking ability of Taiwan equity funds. And we find that the funds have no stock selecting ability under Fama & French alpha model, but have the contrary results under CAPM alpha model. However, considering the number of the factors and the explanation of the two models, we conclude this paper with Fama & French model which shows Taiwan equity funds having no stock selection ability.