abstract In the past, to accommodate the economic development needs of different times Taiwan has set up industrial parks, export processing zones and science parks of different functions, goals and missions to provide land of different types for company settlement. In recent years, to establish local characteristic industries, local governments have attempted in creating quality investment environments by developing industrial parks to attract company settlement and investment. However aside from looking for the funding necessary to buy up lands and construct park infrastructures, the relevant local developments required by the park peripheral public infrastructural needs both contribute to financial burdens for the local governments. Therefore local governments under limited financial resources should cater to factors influencing company investment strategies in setting up the investment environments and adopt most beneficial strategies in monetary allocation to achieve a win-win situation for both the public and private sectors with limited available resources. In the 90¡¦s, to accommodate the expansion needs of the metal processing industry, the Kaohsiung County Government began the development of the Ben-Chou Industrial Park in Gangshan town. During the development, Gangshan Industrial Park experienced changes in the industrial environment and the Koahsiung County Government responded to the sales difficulties arisen from these changes by implementing many strategies to strengthen the investment advantages. In 3 years time the park¡¦s stagnant land sales dropped from 90% to 10%, an astounding achievement for all of local government developed industrial parks. This study sampled 108 companies in Ben-Chou Industrial Park and analyzed the factors involved in companies¡¦ investment in this park. The study shows: 1. When local governments develop industrial parks, characteristic industries can be formed by providing SMEs with room for expansion and utilizing the industrial clustering phenomenon. 2. The government-provided preferential land policy is one of the key factors. 3. The overall cost is still the primary factor in deciding where to invest for SMEs. 4. The government administrative efficiency has gradually become an important factor to consider in deciding where to invest. Therefore, this study suggests that when local governments develop industrial parks, specialized industrial network studies should be taken into consideration and in order to shape these industrial parks into specialized characteristic ones. Secondly, central governments should provide support to local government developed industrial parks; financially preferential policies should be implemented and encourage local governments to develop characteristic industrial parks according to their regional industrial development. Lastly, governments should dedicate in improving administrative efficiency to increase industrial development competitiveness, respond to the needs of industries to amend related policies and regulations and fully enforce these regulations to protect the rights complying companies.

The first empirical chapter examines the existence of a 'net equity issuance' (NEI) effect in the UK stock market. Net Equity Issuance (NEI) refers to the change in a firm's shares outstanding due to events such as SEOs, acquisitions financed by share issues, issues to staff and share repurchases. The NEI effect is the ability of share issuance by firms to predict their subsequent stock returns. My results mainly suggest that there is an NEI effect in the UK. However, a discrepancy exists between the UK results and those found in the US. In the UK market, negative-NEI stocks tend to show negative subsequent returns while zero-NEI stocks have the highest subsequent returns. I also find that the abnormal returns from the NEI effect disappear when transaction costs are taken into account. Furthermore, the asset pricing test results suggest that the new factor models partially explain the NEI effect in the UK. The second empirical chapter evaluates the information content of new asset pricing factors in the UK. I find that two new risk factors, the investment factor and the profitability factor, improve the factor model's performance in the UK while both the size factor 'small minus big' (SMB) and the value factor 'high minus low' (HML) are redundant. There is also evidence that factor construction methods matter to the information content of the profitability factor. The most informative profitability factor in the UK among the possible candidates is constructed using income before extraordinary items scaled by book equity. The third empirical chapter explores the information content of the two new factors by linking them to the state variables which predict future investment opportunities. By doing this, I find confirmative evidence that the two new risk factors may proxy for state variables that capture time variations in the investment opportunity set. I find empirical evidence which confirms that the investment factor predicts future economic growth, proxied by GDP growth, investment growth and consumption growth. In addition, the investment factor is found to be related to dividend yield shocks, whereas the profitability factor is related to inflation shocks. In addition, the pricing significance of macroeconomic variable shocks disappears when loadings on the two new factors are presented in the model. The evidence therefore provides economic interpretation to the information content of the new asset pricing factors in the UK market.