Yes / This study investigates the trading activity in options and stock markets around informed events with extreme daily stock price movements. We find that informed agents are more likely to trade options prior to negative news and stocks ahead of positive news. We also show that optioned stocks overreact to the arrival of negative news, but react efficiently to positive news. However, the overreaction patterns are unique to the subsample of stocks with the lowest pre‐event abnormal option/stock volume ratio (O/S). This finding suggests that the incremental benefit of option listing is related to the level of option trading activity, over and beyond the presence of an options market on the firm’s stock. Finally, we find that the pre‐event abnormal O/S is a better predictor of stock price patterns following a negative shock than is the pre‐event O/S, implying that the former may contain more information about the future value of stocks than the latter.

<p>I study the link between capital markets and sources of macroeconomic risk. In chapter 1 I show that expected inflation risk is priced in the cross section of stock returns even after controlling for cash flow growth and volatility risks. Motivated by this evidence I study a long run risk model with a built-in inflation non-neutrality channel that allows me to decompose the real stochastic discount factor into news about current and expected cash flow growth, news about expected inflation and news about volatility. The model can successfully price a broad menu of assets and provides a setting for analyzing cross sectional variation in expected inflation risk premium. For industries like retail and durable goods inflation risk can account for nearly a third of the overall risk premium while the energy industry and a broad commodity index act like inflation hedges. Nominal bonds are exposed to expected inflation risk and have inflation premiums that increase with bond maturity. The price of expected inflation risk was very high during the 70's and 80's, but has come down a lot since being very close to zero over the past decade. On average, the expected inflation price of risk is negative, consistent with the view that periods of high inflation represent a "bad" state of the world and are associated with low economic growth and poor stock market performance. In chapter 2 I look at the way capital markets react to predetermined macroeconomic announcements. I document significantly higher excess returns on the US stock market on macro release dates as compared to days when no macroeconomic news hit the market. Almost the entire equity premium since 1997 is being realized on days when macroeconomic news are released. At high frequency, there is a pattern of returns increasing in the hours prior to the pre-determined announcement time, peaking around the time of the announcement and dropping thereafter.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis advisor: Edward J. Kane / This paper investigates two issues: how much merger announcements surprise the market and what market responses to the announcement reveal about the motives underlying the proposed deal. Using a simultaneous-equations framework, we model investor anticipations in the first equation and abnormal returns in the second equations. Ouranalysis indicates that investors can successfully predict bidders but not target candidates. Cumulative abnormal returns to bidders whose candidacy was widely anticipated in the market prove significantly larger in magnitude than returns to bidders whose candidacy wasn't anticipated. Bidder abnormal returns differ insignificantly from zero when market expectations are met, whereas bidder returns prove significantly positive when markets are surprised that the firm made a bid. This favorable market response to the surprise in bidder identity suggests that to an important extent managerial merger motives serve shareholder interests. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2006. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.

This study expands on previous research regarding the effect of CEO performance on firm value. An event study is conducted using a market model of CEO successions and daily returns in order to generate predicted returns. Two separate regressions are run using a 3 day and 5 day event window respectively. The results of the regressions are using to compare abnormal returns between industries and market capitalization. While some daily abnormal returns are statistically significant, cross-sectional analysis of CAR are for the most part not significant. Further study is needed in order to come to a stronger conclusion.

The frequency with which acquisitions occur in the South African business environment served as motivation to evaluate the effect of acquisition announcements on the share performance of JSE listed shares. The basis of the study was to use event study methodology to evaluate short term effects as well as to investigate size effects in acquisition announcements. Companies were grouped into small and large companies using market capitalisation as segmentation criteria. To evaluate effects on the share price and volume traded, the market demand curve for traded securities was used. It proved to be a useful tool specifically in the evaluation of smaller companies, where information asymmetry was prevalent. The shift in the demand curve was evaluated by constructing a Demand Curve Variable, which showed the direction (if any) of the change in the demand curve. Acquisition announcements by JSE listed companies over the last seven years were evaluated and confounding events were controlled for. The findings supported the fact that there exist differences in the results of the small and large company samples when making acquisition announcements, and that small companies have more pronounced negative effects subsequent to the announcement of an acquisition. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Master of Arts / Department of Communications / William Schenck-Hamlin / Public Service Announcements are a fixture of both our media and cultural landscape. Their images and messages have inspired and defined movements and generations. The impact of PSAs is explored in this work to highlight the need to examine the impact of an emerging phenomenon of public service messaging: The Hybrid PSA. The Hybrid PSA is a message that blends and blurs the line between commercial and social causes. To explore the intricacies and impact of the Hybrid PSA, this work first works to define the “classical” PSA. Then, by observation and critique, the variance between the “classic” and the Hybrid is established. To contrast, the genre of Propaganda is explored and the possibility that the Hybrid PSA could be defined as propaganda is examined. Finally, the ethical implications of such a generic classification being established are discussed.

This paper investigates the impact of dividend reduction announcements on the returns to stocks listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. We perform an event study on dividend cutting firms between 2002-2016 to determine if contrarian trading on the basis of negative dividend announcement yields abnormal returns. We evaluate the immediate market reaction during a three-day event window surrounding dividend announcements. Thereafter we test a contrarian trading strategy by examining abnormal returns during a holding period up to twenty days following the initial event. We evaluate the results in reference to previous literature on post earnings (dividend) announcement drift and contrarian investment strategies. The findings suggest that the initial market reaction to dividend cuts is negative, but that the abnormal returns to buying stock following dividend reduction announcements are negligible. Furthermore, we argue that there might be means of increasing these returns by supplementary analysis of firm specifics.

Recent research documents that voluntary disclosure—in particular, managerial forecast guidance—lowers uncertainty levels, as proxied by option implied variances. In this study I explore the effect of such voluntary disclosure on other dimensions of uncertainty. In particular, I investigate the effect of managerial guidance on the variance risk premium (VRP). Prior research predicts and provides empirical evidence of the VRP, which reflects that implied variances (on average) exceed actual variances, and exists to compensate traders, who sell variance protection for equity options. First, I confirm previous findings that implied variances are lower when firms issue management guidance. Second and more importantly, I document that the VRP is higher when firms provide guidance. I reconcile these seemingly contradictory results by (i) confirming that a significant portion of the increase in VRP is attributable to uncertainty specific to the impending earnings announcement, consistent with the primary role played by the voluntary management disclosure; and (ii) documenting that a higher moment of uncertainty—implied kurtosis levels (i.e., price jump risk)—is higher with managerial guidance. Additional tests examining characteristics of managerial guidance reveal these findings are strongest for firms issuing sporadic guidance, guidance issued close to earnings announcements, and those exhibiting the largest surprise. Overall, the evidence suggests that voluntary disclosure such as management guidance can reduce expected variance, but simultaneously increase higher order moments of uncertainty such as expected price jumps.

Stockholders invest billions of dollars in the purchase of new corporate coffee stock while producers of these commodities exist in poverty of developing nations. Corporate managers may miss the opportunities for offering humanitarian aid if potential stockholders do not know of corporate social change initiatives. Little research in the influence of socially conscious initiatives exists in the coffee sector and none concentrating on socially conscious initiative announcements. If a relationship exists between socially conscious initiative announcements and stock investments, then managers could justify funding social change initiatives. This quantitative study used a 5 day pre and post event study methodology including t tests, ANOVAs, and regressions examining five companies with 138 individual announcements from 5 coffee companies between 2011 and 2015. The independent variables were socially conscious initiative announcements regarding separate initiatives in the Wall Street Journal and differing socially conscious initiatives in the Washington Post. The dependent variables were abnormal changes in the Standard and Poor coffee corporate closing prices. This study used the Weighted Average Cost of Capital, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, and the Fama-French 3 Factors Model to demonstrate abnormal positive stock abnormalities. resulting in statistically significant positive findings pre and post publication in the five companies examined. Further research could use different time periods or media outlets. Similar findings could support advantages for investors and managers for aiding struggling coffee producers enticing other corporations to follow suit leading to beneficial worldwide social good development.

This study presents an observation of the impact of Opec announcements on the behavior of sector indexes returns of the Stockholm stock market. It looks at the effects of the announcements on the stock returns of three sectors indices of theStockholm stock market: Energy, Telecommunications and Financial using the general market index return (OMX Stockholm 30) as the explanatory variable. The time period analyzed is limited to the years of 2005 to 2007 when markets worldwide were taken by euphoria and panic caused by the anticipation of the upcoming financial crisis given that it has been well proved that such events do cause a substantial effect on stock prices. In order to estimate the reaction of the sector index returns over Opec announcements, the author uses the event studies and constructs an extended version of the CAPM model by introducing dummy variables for each day of the set of announcements over the event window. It is used stationary time series data and the returns on the three sector indices were subdivided in an event window of 5 days around the announcement dates in continuous intervals of 3 years according to the Stockholm stock market trading days. As to improve the results obtained with the CAPM model, the author uses the Cumulative Abnormal Returns (CAR) which adds all the coefficients of the dummy variables which are the returns in excess of what is expected. The empirical findings for the event study reveal that none of the dummy variable coefficients were significant which indicate that none of the sector indexes is sensitive to the announcements. For the CAR results, the Telecommunication was the only sector that responded to news. Most likely because the general market index OMXST30 has proved to create extra returns around these dates. That is probably the reason that the three sector indexes could not produce significant additional response.