No description available.

Thesis advisor: Pierluigi Balduzzi / Essay one of this dissertation investigates the relation between fundamental idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns idiosyncratic volatility using data from 56 countries over 1980-2014. I find a strong positive relation between fundamental idiosyncratic volatility and idiosyncratic volatility of returns. This association, however, seems to be entirely driven by the developed economies and I find no effect in the emerging markets. Specifically, fundamental idiosyncratic volatility does not lead to more idiosyncratic return volatility in countries with poor legal institutions and weak shareholder protection laws. The second essay examines the effect of accounting standards on return predictability by using a variance decomposition approach, and is joint work with Pierluigi Balduzzi, Gil Sadka, and Ronnie Sadka. We decompose returns into a cash-flow news component and a discount-rate news component, and investigate cross-sectional and time-series changes in the contribution of each component to return variations. We also decompose returns for 20 industries in three subsample periods to examine the effect of accounting standards on different industries over time. Our results contribute to our understanding of the effect of accounting practices on accounting variables and return predictability. The third essay studies the effect of short-selling on stock price informativeness. Morck, Yeung, and Yu (2000), in their pioneering study of international differences in stock price synchronicity, emphasize the effect of market development on the ability of investors to incorporate firm-specific information into prices. I use a unique institutional feature in the Hong Kong market to investigate one of the important tools investors use to incorporate information into prices and hence, reduce stock price synchronicity; short-selling. Examining the cross-sectional and time-series variation in short-sale constraints in the Hong Kong market, I find that following the removal of short-sale constraints, stock prices become more informative and move less in tandem with the market. My findings contribute to our understanding of the impact of short-sales constraints on stock price informativeness. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.

No description available.

This research is to improve the efficiency of present prediction factors. It has been tested that many factors have prediction power toward stocks returns. Although the prediction power is not stable, the factors are still valuable. This research analyzes preceding factors by neural network in order to make better use of these factors. Besides, we examine 15 companies respectively and compare the results between neural network and liner regression of those companies. Data are divided into training period and prediction period. We use data of training period to build up our model and test the model by the data from prediction period to verify the prediction powers of the models. The results show neural network has better solution compared to liner regression in both training and prediction period. Neural network is more precision and has less prediction error.

It is wide believed that the economic growth is good to stockholders, but there still exist some arguments about the positive relationship between the economic growth and stock market returns. We prove that the economic growth has positive effect on the stock market returns. As a result, the stockholders could use the economic index to choose their target market to earn return. We find that the stock market could only reflect the short term condition of the country and could not reflect the long term accumulation of a country. That is, the national competitiveness could not reflect on the stock market return for stockholders in the long term. Otherwise, we also find that the capital formation and productivity are significantly positive to the stock market returns. We use the real GDP growth rate as the economic growth proxy and the national competitiveness rank to measure the national competitiveness from IMD competitiveness center. The time period of data is from 1997~2010. Fifty countries included in our sample.

No description available.

The objective of this thesis is to explain the behaviour of stock returns around the disclosure of different types of information release by UK companies. Previous literature has documented the existence of both market anticipation and the lagged impounding of value relevant information. The main objective of this research is, therefore, to identify the conditions under which investors choose to be informed in anticipation of and in response to, a corporate disclosure. More specifically, we explain the behaviour of stock returns in terms of the costs and benefits which investors must consider when deciding whether to acquire and interpret information. The results indicate that market anticipation is an increasing function of firm size, the number of years a firm has been trading and the volatility of prior stock returns. However, increased voluntary disclosure by firms would appear to reduce the ability of investors to and anticipate and interpret information. The volatility of stock returns, prior to the disclosure, is nevertheless the main driving force behind the explanation of post-announcement drift. There are also indications that investors' initial reactions to both earnings and non-earnings news are not based on informed judgements, and that bad news is generally associated with greater uncertainty than good news. Bad news would appear to be more difficult to anticipate and interpret, relative to good news. On further examination, however, investor anticipation is shown to be largely based on information as opposed to uninformed trading.

The primary aim of this study is to investigate the stock return volatility surrounding management earnings forecasts. Disclosure by managers of expected earnings are particularly important communications, and as such, it is important to understand the capital market implications surrounding them. In doing so, the research questions are essentially aimed at examining the stock return volatility, first, at the release of a management earnings forecast, and second, at the eventual announcement of the realised earnings for that period. The first test investigates whether there is an increase in volatility surrounding a management earnings forecast for those firms who release them compared to a matched-firm sample of firms without a management earnings forecast at that date, and then further examines that result based on different forecast antecedents and forecast characteristics. Next, this study tests, for firms who do release a management earnings forecast during the year, whether stock volatility is lower than firms who do not release a management earnings forecast at the eventual earnings announcement date. In brief, the evidence using the Garman and Klass [1980] ???best analytic scale-invariant estimator??? of volatility in an Australian context, between 1993 and 2003, finds that stock return volatility is greater for bad news forecasts, forecasts of low specificity, and forecasts issued by firms perceived ex ante as being of lower credibility using both permutation analysis and modelling daily volatility. At the earnings announcement date, however, there is no evidence that stock return volatility is lower for firms that issue management earnings forecasts during the year. Overall, this result challenges the information asymmetry argument in the literature that disclosure will reduce volatility in the long-run.

博士（商学） / 甲第544号 / 3, 175p / Hitotsubashi University(一橋大学)

I investigate the information content in the implied volatility spread, which is the spread in implied volatilities between a pair of call and put options with the same strike price and time-to-maturity. By constructing the implied volatility time series for each stock, I show that stocks with larger implied volatility spreads tend to have higher future returns during 2003-2013. I also find that even volatilities implied from untraded options contain such information about future stock performance. The trading strategy based on the information contained in the actively traded options does not necessarily outperform its counterpart derived from the untraded options. This is inconsistent with the previous research suggesting that the information contained in the implied volatility spread largely results from the price pressure induced by informed trading in option markets. Further analysis suggests that option illiquidity is associated with the implied volatility spread, and the magnitude of this spread contains information about the risk-neutral distribution of the underlying stock return. A larger spread is associated with smaller risk-neutral variance, more negative risk-neutral skewness, and seemingly larger risk-neutral kurtosis, and this association is primarily driven by the systematic components in risk-neutral higher moments. I design a calibration study which reveals that the non-normality of the underlying risk-neutral return distribution relative to the Brownian motion can give rise to the implied volatility spread through the channel of early exercise premium.