archives@tulane.edu / 1 / Mengde Liu

Sustainability has become one of the key issues facing today’s organisations. Poor risk management, excessive compensation and greed have opened the behaviour of organisations to the eyes of the world and have called in corporate disclosures to date. While an increase of disclosure in non-financial reports has been noted, there is little evidence to suggest that the investment community is using this information to make informed investment decisions. The goal of this research was to draw attention to the importance of alignment of non-financial information between organisations and the investment community, in order to ultimately encourage responsible investment. This was done by way of a three-phase endeavor that delivered: • A best-practice framework for the communication of non-financial performance by organisations • An assessment of six South African organisations and their communication of non-financial information, specifically with their investment community • An assessment of six investment firms’ perceptions and expectations of non-financial performance communication in South Africa The study highlighted the importance of engaging the investor community in order to understand their expectation of non-financial performance information, thus rendering non-financial reports useful to the investment community and progressing the responsible investment movement in South Africa. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This work finds that Managerial and Investor Sentiment are determined by differing sets of economic variables, that share some common factors: inflation, liquidity and the term premium. Decomposing the Sentiment Indices, it is found that the Investor Sentiment Model Component and the Managerial Sentiment Residual Component are primarily responsible for the predictive power of predicting cross-sectional stock returns that is much stronger than previous results. Evidence is presented that part of the predictive power is due to the components predicting priced market factors. Overall, there is strong evidence that the predictive power of Managerial Sentiment is driven primarily by private information, while the predictive power of Investor Sentiment is driven by public information.

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Using the Student Investment Fund at Claremont McKenna College as a proxy for inexperienced investors, I demonstrate that inexperienced investors using fundamental analysis produce momentum-like buying patterns. The results show that the Student Investment Fund is on average buying stocks that outperform Carhart’s four-factor asset pricing model in the year before purchase. As a result, the Student Investment Fund has, on average, underperformed the S&P500 by .48% per year since 1996. My thesis explores why the Student Investment Fund may have adopted momentum-like purchasing patterns and what steps can be taken to remedy it.

In this time of the oversaturated market, every company that doesn't want to focus only on domestic market has to start thinking about expanding abroad. But there is not enough information about every country and Nicaragua belongs to that group of unknown countries. The aim of this thesis is to make it easier for investors to decide whether to enter their market or not or at least drag their attention to Nicaragua. This thesis is divided into 5 main chapters -- general information about the country and its inhabitants, the second chapter provides the information about the economy and financial situation of the country, third and fourth chapter are dedicated to distinctiveness of the Nicaraguan culture and business. The last chapter shows 3 different analyses of the market that are also applied to the Nicaraguan market.

This study examines whether earnings guidance contributes to investor short-termism -- excessive focus on a firm's short term performance and insufficient consideration of its long-term value creation potential. Using an adaptation of Ohlson's (1995) valuation model, I find that investors place significantly higher (lower) weight on short-term (long-term) earnings of quarterly guidance firms than on the corresponding earnings of non-guidance firms. Further tests indicate that the differential weighting cannot be fully explained by measurement errors, earnings properties, risk, or accuracy of analysts' forecasts. For a sample of guidance initiating firms, I find no differential valuations of firm value components before the initiation of guidance, but large differential valuations after guidance initiation. In contrast, for guidance discontinuation firms, I find that investors shift their focus from short-term to long-term earnings after the discontinuation of guidance. Together, the results support critics' claim that quarterly guidance contributes to short-term fixation in the market. / text

Chapter one shows that US households with high unconditional and cyclical labor income risk are more leveraged and allocate a greater share of their financial assets to stocks. I use self-reported risk preferences to show that rational sorting of risk tolerant workers into risky employment is responsible for this otherwise puzzling result. With risk preferences accounted for, I find evidence that households with greater permanent income variance reduce leverage and stock allocations to an extent consistent with theory. However, household portfolios and employment selection do not respond significantly to any of the other three forms of labor income risk I measure: disaster risk, permanent income cyclicality, and permanent income variance cyclicality. Chapter two reports evidence that individual investors in Indian equities hold better performing portfolios as they become more experienced in the equity market. Experienced investors tilt their portfolios profitably towards value stocks and stocks with low turnover, but these tilts do not fully explain their performance. Experienced investors also tend to have lower turnover and disposition bias. These behaviors, as well as underdiversification, diminish when investors experience poor returns resulting from them, consistent with models of reinforcement learning. Furthermore, Indian stocks held by experienced, well diversified, low-turnover and low-disposition-bias investors deliver higher average returns even controlling for a standard set of stock-level characteristics. Chapter three shows that news reflected by industry stock returns is only gradually incorporated into stock prices in other countries. Information links between cross-border portfolios play a significant role in explaining variation in the speed of this incorporation; responses to industry news are rapid across borders where portfolios share more crosslistings, equity analyst coverage, and a greater common equity investor base. The drift in returns following cross-border industry news has halved in the past 25 years. About half of this change relates to a growth in information links and reductions in expropriations risks facing foreign investors. A simple long-short trading strategy designed to exploit gradual diffusion of industry news across borders appears profitable, but is unlikely to yield returns as high as the 8 to 9 percent annual rate the strategy has returned historically. / Economics

Diss. Univ. St. Gallen, 2002.

Diss. Univ. St. Gallen, 2004.