This thesis consists of empirical studies on various aspects of international corporate finance, a series of long-run event studies examining the abnormal stock return performance of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), and stock analyst recommendations. The first two of these, presented in Chapters 2 and 3, investigate the key issues relating to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). The next, in Chapter 4, examines the performance of new American Depositary Receipt issues from emerging markets and its determinants. The final study, presented in Chapter 5, assesses the value of stock analysts? recommendations in emerging markets. It is essentially a series of empirical studies adopting a tried and tested methodology, involving benchmarks, for measuring returns over time in emerging markets, a subject that has not been sufficiently investigated. The long-run event study approach is designed to identify anomalies in these markets, which may be much more pronounced than in developed markets. This thesis makes substantive contributions to the existing knowledge on measuring, documenting and determining various issues in international corporate finance, and provides methodological improvements over previous studies. Chapter 2 presents an examination of the stock return performance of the IPO stocks listed on the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) in Hong Kong, finding that the return performance is sensitive to the benchmark employed. Two main factors contributing to the underperformance of GEM stocks are the ?technology boom? and ?IPO effects?. Moreover, the results of cross-sectional analyses suggest that the Hong Kong GEM is a unique market; since at least 70 percent of the IPO stocks listed on the GEM are technology stocks, the ?technology? factor outweighs previous hypotheses advocated by previous researchers to explain the poor performance of newly listed stocks. Chapter 3 extends this analysis by turning attention to the post-issue stock price performance of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in Asian markets, using a comparative assessment of the stock performance of Asian IPOs motivated by the ongoing discovery of biases in event studies involving long horizon returns. Various methods were used to remove such biases, while examining the robustness of the long run performance of the IPOs. The results of this examination show that the existence of long run underperformance for the Asian IPOs depends on the methodology used. The study also assesses the ?Market Timing? theory with regard to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), adding to the growing literature that suggests that Asian firms time their issuance of equity securities. Chapter 4 presents a comparative study of the post-issue stock performance and operating performance of the Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) of American Depositary Receipts (ADR) in emerging markets. The results of this study suggest that ADR IPOs are underpriced, though not to the same extent as regular IPOs. In the aftermarket, ADR IPOs underperform the Emerging Market Index. However, after controlling for differences in size and industry, underperformance of ADR IPOs compared with both home market IPOs and US IPOs could not be demonstrated. The analysis of stock and operating performance yields consistent results; aside from the ?window dressing? effect, this also demonstrates that stock price performance is a reflection of operating performance over the long run. Chapter 5 presents the first study to examine post-recommendation abnormal returns in emerging markets, based on the Emerging Market Index adjusted model and the Controlling Firm approach, demonstrating that stock prices react significantly to recommendation revisions, both on the revision day and subsequently. In this cross-sectional analysis, it appears that the Market-to-Book ratio is the primary indicator for Buy and Strong Buy recommendations. This indicates that stock analysts in emerging markets prefer high growth stocks with their attractive characteristics.

This thesis consists of empirical studies on various aspects of international corporate finance, a series of long-run event studies examining the abnormal stock return performance of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), and stock analyst recommendations. The first two of these, presented in Chapters 2 and 3, investigate the key issues relating to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). The next, in Chapter 4, examines the performance of new American Depositary Receipt issues from emerging markets and its determinants. The final study, presented in Chapter 5, assesses the value of stock analysts? recommendations in emerging markets. It is essentially a series of empirical studies adopting a tried and tested methodology, involving benchmarks, for measuring returns over time in emerging markets, a subject that has not been sufficiently investigated. The long-run event study approach is designed to identify anomalies in these markets, which may be much more pronounced than in developed markets. This thesis makes substantive contributions to the existing knowledge on measuring, documenting and determining various issues in international corporate finance, and provides methodological improvements over previous studies. Chapter 2 presents an examination of the stock return performance of the IPO stocks listed on the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) in Hong Kong, finding that the return performance is sensitive to the benchmark employed. Two main factors contributing to the underperformance of GEM stocks are the ?technology boom? and ?IPO effects?. Moreover, the results of cross-sectional analyses suggest that the Hong Kong GEM is a unique market; since at least 70 percent of the IPO stocks listed on the GEM are technology stocks, the ?technology? factor outweighs previous hypotheses advocated by previous researchers to explain the poor performance of newly listed stocks. Chapter 3 extends this analysis by turning attention to the post-issue stock price performance of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in Asian markets, using a comparative assessment of the stock performance of Asian IPOs motivated by the ongoing discovery of biases in event studies involving long horizon returns. Various methods were used to remove such biases, while examining the robustness of the long run performance of the IPOs. The results of this examination show that the existence of long run underperformance for the Asian IPOs depends on the methodology used. The study also assesses the ?Market Timing? theory with regard to Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), adding to the growing literature that suggests that Asian firms time their issuance of equity securities. Chapter 4 presents a comparative study of the post-issue stock performance and operating performance of the Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) of American Depositary Receipts (ADR) in emerging markets. The results of this study suggest that ADR IPOs are underpriced, though not to the same extent as regular IPOs. In the aftermarket, ADR IPOs underperform the Emerging Market Index. However, after controlling for differences in size and industry, underperformance of ADR IPOs compared with both home market IPOs and US IPOs could not be demonstrated. The analysis of stock and operating performance yields consistent results; aside from the ?window dressing? effect, this also demonstrates that stock price performance is a reflection of operating performance over the long run. Chapter 5 presents the first study to examine post-recommendation abnormal returns in emerging markets, based on the Emerging Market Index adjusted model and the Controlling Firm approach, demonstrating that stock prices react significantly to recommendation revisions, both on the revision day and subsequently. In this cross-sectional analysis, it appears that the Market-to-Book ratio is the primary indicator for Buy and Strong Buy recommendations. This indicates that stock analysts in emerging markets prefer high growth stocks with their attractive characteristics.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 144-154).

Mergers and acquisitions are a key component in the toolbox of business strategies that companies employ to improve organisational performance. Empirical studies that focus on domestic mergers and acquisitions activity in developed countries are numerous, however there remains a limited amount of research into the effects of cross border mergers and acquisitions on the performance of acquiring companies, especially in emerging markets. This research examined whether cross border mergers and acquisitions concluded by acquiring companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange have a positive or negative impact on the operating financial and short term share price performance of the listed acquirer. A quantitative approach was adopted for the purpose of this research. In order to analyse the impact of cross border mergers and acquisitions transactions on the share price and operating financial performance of listed acquiring firms secondary data was utilised. The research incorporated publicly available daily share trading data for shares traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and financial and accounting data sourced from McGregorBFA. In addition, the sample of cross border mergers and acquisitions transactions was obtained from the MergerMarket database. Purposive sampling was applied to select an initial sample of 44 transactions. Based on the exclusion of confounding events a final sample of 29 transactions was tested. Given the small sample size, and that confounding events were determined not to have a material impact on the cross border transactions, comparative analysis was performed using the initial sample of 44 transactions. Different lenses were applied for testing financial performance by using three performance measures. These included abnormal share price returns; key financial performance ratios and industry adjusted operating cash flow return on assets. Various short-term event windows were analysed for each of these measures. Parametric tests including t-tests for unequal variance and paired t-tests were applied in the research. Given the small sample size non-parametric testing in the form of Wilcoxon Signed Rank Sum tests was also applied. In addition, bootstrapping was applied to the cumulative average abnormal returns. This research concluded that both the short-term share price and operating financial performance of acquiring companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange does not improve significantly in the short-term post the cross border merger or acquisition transaction. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / lmgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

This thesis introduces three variable clustering methods designed in the context of diversified portfolio selection. The motivation is to cluster financial assets in order to identify a small set of assets to approximate the level of diversification of the whole universe of stocks. First, we develop a data-driven approach to variable clustering based on a correlation blockmodel, in which assets in the same cluster have the same correlations with all other assets. Under the correlation blockmodel, the assets in the same cluster are controlled by the same latent factor. In addition, each cluster forms an equivalent class among assets, in the sense that the portfolio consisting of one stock from each cluster will have the same correlation matrix, regardless of the specific stocks chosen. We devise an algorithm named ACC (Asset Clustering through Correlation) to detect the clusters, with theoretical analysis and practical guidance for tuning the parameter for the algorithm. Our second method studies a multi-factor block model, which is a generalization of the correlation blockmodel. Under this multi-factor block model, assets in the same cluster are governed by a set of multiple latent factors, instead of a single factor, as in the correlation blockmodel. Observations of the asset returns lie near a union of low-dimensional subspaces under this model. We propose a subspace clustering method that utilizes square-root LASSO nodewise regression to identify these subspaces and recover the corresponding clusters. Through theoretical analysis, we provide a practical and straightforward guidance for choosing the regularization parameters. Existing subspace clustering methods based on regularized nodewise regression often arbitrarily choose the form of the regularization. The parameter that controls the regularization is also often determined exogenously or by cross-validation.Our third method theoretically unifies the choices of the regularizer and its parameter by formulating a distributionally robust version of nodewise regression. In this new formulation, we optimize the worst-case square loss within a region of distributional uncertainty around the empirical distribution. We show that this formulation naturally leads to a spectral-norm regularized optimization problem. In addition, the parameter that controls the regularization is nothing but the radius of the uncertainty region and can be determined easily based on the degree of uncertainty in the data. We also propose an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm for efficient implementation. Finally, we design and implement an empirical analysis framework to verify the performance of the three proposed clustering methods. This framework consists of four main steps: clustering, stock selection, asset allocation, and portfolio backtesting. The main idea is to select stocks from each cluster to construct a portfolio and then assess the clustering method by analyzing the portfolio's performance. Using this framework, we can easily compare new clustering methods with existing ones by creating portfolios with the same selection and allocation strategies. We apply this framework to the daily returns of the S&P 500 stock universe. Specifically, we compare portfolios constructed using different clustering methods and asset allocation strategies with the S&P 500 Index benchmark. Portfolios from our proposed clustering methods outperform the benchmark significantly. They also perform favorably compared to other existing clustering algorithms in terms of the risk-adjusted return.

This dissertation is a study of fundamental questions in macro-finance using modern tools from textual analysis. These questions include how financial constraints affect firm investment and financing decisions when they are not presently binding, and whether stock returns are predictable based on concerns revealed in conversations between firms and investors. The first chapter examines whether financial covenants are an important consideration for firm decisions when they are not presently in violation. A key empirical challenge is measuring the risk of future covenant violations, which is not directly observed. I propose a novel measure of concerns about future violations by distinguishing between discussions of covenants in earnings calls that relate to the future as opposed to the past or present. As validation, I show that the measure predicts future violations and covaries intuitively with earnings, leverage, and default risk. Importantly, I find that concerns about covenants are significantly associated with reductions in investment as well as debt and equity financing activities. These responses persist even after controlling for standard measures of investment opportunities and are economically large relative to the effects of actual violations. The second chapter empirically analyzes two explanations for how covenants concerns relate to a firm's investment decisions. One explanation is that covenant concerns coincide with a deterioration in expected profitability, which dampens firms' incentives to invest. A second explanation is that firms become concerned when they expect violations to be more costly, which indicates future difficulties with funding investments. To shed light on the relevance of these two explanations, I examine empirical patterns in analyst expectations of future earnings, loan amendments in SEC filings, and the stock returns of firms that mention covenant concerns. The evidence suggest that both explanations are relevant mechanisms driving the correlation between covenant concerns and firm activity. However, I find that the second channel is more economically significant, suggesting that covenant concerns are informative about the degree to which firms are constrained by financial covenants. In the third chapter, I investigate how covenant concerns relate to firm policies in a standard model of investments with financial frictions. In the model, the theoretical object that most naturally links to covenant concerns is the expected shadow cost of the borrowing constraint. As in the data, the shadow cost of the borrowing constraint covaries negatively with earnings as well as firm investment and financing activity. Through an analysis of impulse response functions, I show how the empirical correlations between covenant concerns and firm policy arise in the model. One channel is through negative productivity shocks, which raises covenant concerns and leads to a fall in investment, debt, and equity issuance. The second channel is through higher leverage, holding fixed productivity. In the model, firm with higher debt levels are more concerned about covenants when hit by a negative productivity shock, and also choose less investment, debt issuance, and equity issuance. In this chapter, I also discuss several shortcomings of the model and suggest avenues for modifications. The final chapter investigates a new question: are stock returns predictable based on the extent to which firms are concerned about the macroeconomy? We document that firms that pay more attention to the macroeconomy earn lower average returns relative to firms that pay less attention to the macroeconomy. Differences in returns are economically significant and are not explained by traditional asset pricing factors, such as market beta, size, value, and idiosyncratic volatility. To explain the negative macroeconomic attention premium, we propose a model of attention allocation that links analyst attention to fundamental shocks affecting firm cash flows. In the model, attention to the macroeconomy is increasing in the share of earning news explained by the macroeconomic component. Firms with a greater share of cash flow news explained by the macroeconomic component face lower cash flow risk, hence earn lower expected returns.

In chapter one, I examine the predictive content of subjective return expectations derived from price targets issued by equity analysts. Equity price targets are an ubiquitous feature of the financial information landscape, but it is not clear how informative they actually are. In this chapter, I show that the cross-section of price-target implied subjective return expectations contains rich informational content for forecasting returns. In-sample, I find that expected returns correlate strongly with average cross-sectional returns to a large panel of portfolios formed on the basis of observable firm characteristics. In out-of-sample exercises, forecasting models using subjective expectations are shown to offer more accurate predictions for portfolio returns than several other commonly employed, cross-sectional predictors, including the book-to-market and dividend-price ratios, momentum, and forward-looking cash-flow measures. Furthermore, these differences are shown to be economically relevant, with conditional portfolios formed on the basis of subjective expectations offering substantially improved risk-adjusted returns compared to many of the other predictors considered. The relative informational content, as well as the production by analysts, of subjective return expectations is found, however, to peak during recessions, with negligible predictive advantage discernible in expansions. In chapter two, my coauthors (Adam Rej, with CFM; David Thesmar, with MIT, CEPR, and NBER) and I empirically analyze a large panel of firm sales growth expectations. We find that the relationship between forecast errors and lagged revision is non-linear. Forecasters underreact to typical (positive or negative) news about future sales, but overreact to very significant news. To account for this non-linearity, we propose a simple framework, where (1) sales growth dynamics have a fat-tailed high frequency component and (2) forecasters use a simple linear rule. This framework qualitatively fits several additional features of data on sales growth dynamics, forecast errors, and stock returns. In chapter three, my coauthor (Ken Teoh, with Columbia) and I construct a novel text-based measure of firm-level attention to macroeconomic conditions and document that stocks associated with higher macroeconomic attention earn lower returns. Moving from the bottom decile to top decile of macroeconomic attention decreases a stock’s average return by 11.6\% per year. We propose a risk-based explanation in which stocks with higher macroeconomic attention contribute less idiosyncratic cash flow risk to the investor’s portfolio, hence earn lower expected returns. Decomposing the unexpected returns of macroeconomic attention-sorted portfolios into cash flow and discount rate news, we find that portfolios with higher macroeconomic attention stocks have lower cash flow risk.

Thesis (MBA (Business Management))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This event study examines the effect that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) announcements have on a companies' share price. The average mean return model is applied to study a sample of companies from the Financial Mail Top 200 Empowerment Companies list, 2007. The mean price change observed in a 7-day window around the event announcement is found to be significant relative to the calculated critical value. Results of the test statistic calculated relative to the probability shows that at a p-value of 0,00113, the result is significant and the null hypothesis is rejected at a 95% confidence level. This result of this study supports the fact that markets react positively to the announcements of BEE events. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie ondersoek die verhouding tussen die verandering van 'n maatskappy se aandele prys wanneer hierdie maatskappy 'n aankondiging maak oor 'n Swart Ekonomiese Transaksie (SET). Die Financial Mail Top 200 Empowerment Companies 2007 lys is gebruik om maatskappye te kies vir die studie. Die gemiddelde verandering in aandele prys in a 7-dag venster rondom die SET aankondiging blyk merkwaardig te wees wanneer met 'n berekende kritiese waarde vergelyk word. Die toets statistiek bewys dat met 'n p-waarde van 0,00113 daar met 95% sekerheid die nul hipotese kan verwerp. Die resultaat van hierdie studie ondersteun die feit dat markte positief reageer teenoor maatskappye wat nuus oor SET transaksies aankondig.

Thesis (MDF)--Stellenbosch University, 2011. / In the past it was believed that the payment of dividends would decrease the funds available to finance growth, and would therefore lead to lower future earnings growth. This belief was challenged in recent years with research that tested the relationship between dividend payout and future earnings growth, both on the individual company and aggregate market level in different countries. The results contradicted popular belief, and showed that companies with high payout ratios tend to realise stronger future earnings growth. This study tested the same relationship in South Africa and concluded that even in a developing country, dividend payout will still lead to higher future earnings growth.

Hung, Chun Man. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-74). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / 摘要 --- p.ii / Acknowledgement --- p.iii / Table of Content --- p.iv / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Hong Kong securities market background --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Purpose and brief results --- p.4 / Chapter 1.3 --- Organization of the paper --- p.5 / Chapter 2. --- Literature Review --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1 --- Theoretical Studies --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2 --- Empirical Studies --- p.8 / Chapter 3. --- Methodology --- p.14 / Chapter 3.1 --- Hypothesis development --- p.14 / Chapter 3.2 --- Data and Sample Characteristics --- p.16 / Chapter 3.3 --- Sample selection rules --- p.17 / Chapter 3.4 --- Variables definitions --- p.19 / Chapter 3.5 --- Estimation of market betas (pre-ranking and post-ranking) --- p.23 / Chapter 3.5.1 --- Betas estimation procedure --- p.23 / Chapter 3.5.2 --- Results and findings --- p.25 / Chapter 4. --- Size- Dispersion Portfolio Strategy --- p.27 / Chapter 4.1 --- Formation of size-beta portfolio --- p.27 / Chapter 4.2 --- Results and findings --- p.28 / Chapter 5. --- Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions --- p.32 / Chapter 5.1 --- Relation between dispersion and other firm characteristics --- p.32 / Chapter 5.2 --- Relation between future stocks returns and firm characteristics --- p.33 / Chapter 5.3 --- Robustness check --- p.38 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Sub-period regressions --- p.38 / Chapter 5.4 --- Possible Explanations --- p.39 / Chapter 6. --- Conclusion Remarks --- p.44 / Chapter 6.1 --- Conclusion --- p.44 / Chapter 6.2 --- Limitations and future direction --- p.45 / Tables --- p.47 / Table 1 Key statistics for the Hong Kong stock market --- p.47 / "Table 2 Sectoral distribution of market capitalization (per cent of total),1997-2006" --- p.48 / "Table 3 Market capitalization: top twenty firms (percentage of total market), 2006" --- p.49 / Table 4 Summary of empirical literature of dispersion on stock returns --- p.50 / Table 5 Summary Statistics for 70 sample stocks: January 1997 to December 2003 --- p.51 / Table 5 Summary Statistics for 70 sample stocks: January 1997 to December 2003(continue) --- p.52 / Table 5 Summary Statistics for 70 sample stocks: January 1997 to December 2003(continue) --- p.53 / Table 6 Sample properties based on sectoral distribution --- p.54 / Table 7 Descriptive statistics for the analysts´ة forecasts dispersion: 1997-2003 --- p.55 / Table 8 Properties of the nine size-beta portfolio for the sample period from January 1997 to December 2003 --- p.56 / Table 9 Mean and Median Portfolio Returns by Size and Dispersion in Analysts´ة Forecasts --- p.57 / Table 9 Mean and Median Portfolio Returns by Size and Dispersion in Analysts´ة Forecasts --- p.58 / Table 10 Mean Portfolio Dispersion by Size and Dispersion in Analysts´ة Forecasts --- p.59 / Table 11 Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions of analysts´ة forecasts dispersion on lagged firm characteristics --- p.60 / Table 12 Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions of Stock excess returns on lagged firm characteristics --- p.61 / Table 12 Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions of Stock excess returns on lagged firm characteristics (continue) --- p.62 / Table 13 Overall monthly correlation matrix between explanatory variables for the period January 1997 to December 2003 --- p.63 / Table 15 Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions of Stock excess returns on lagged firm characteristics (second sub-period) --- p.66 / Table 15 Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions of Stock excess returns on lagged firm characteristics (second sub-period) (continue) --- p.67 / Figures --- p.68 / Figure 1 Growth trend of the Hong Kong stock market --- p.68 / Figure 2 Equities funds raised by H shares enterprise for GEM --- p.69 / Appendix one --- p.70 / References --- p.71