Chinese migrants play a serious role in their destination countries, and through demand, support high values in destination property and financial markets. Therefore, Chinese investors’ investment motivations, preferences and behaviours have a significant impact on the New Zealand economy. The objectives of this research are: to investigate the preferences (what kind of investment assets they prefer) and the motivations (why they chose New Zealand as their investment destination) of Chinese migrant investors. The findings will be a useful element in explaining New Zealand’s economic development, and in making financial decisions. It also will be important for the development of New Zealand’s growing finance industry and equity market. The researcher collected data from 20 respondents who are Chinese migrant investors who have made New Zealand their home. The collected data examines investors’ preferences and motivations, such as what kind of investment assets they prefer and the motivations which drive them to invest in New Zealand or elsewhere. Using a grounded theory methodology, the researcher draws some findings from the data analysis. Furthermore, using a constant comparative method, the researcher develops some preferred choices which explain Chinese migrant investors’ investment preferences and motivations. The core findings (called phenomena or categories) of Chinese migrant investors’ preferences and motivations in this study are listed below:  Home-bias investment behaviour – that is mainly China and New Zealand  Following past performance / herding behaviour  Seeking speculative opportunities – high return, high risk  Over confidence  Taxation evasion  Financial privacy Considering these core categories, the researcher re-tested and re-analysed all interview data. Two refined themes are drawn: 1. Chinese investors don’t understand investment; they seek speculative investment opportunities exemplifying non-professional opportunistic behaviours. 2. Chinese investors don’t take New Zealand as their preferred investment destination until they arrive in New Zealand. Finally, the researcher reconsiders both themes and other inferences, to develop a theory from the ground – exaggerated Chinese financial investment experiences are relayed to other Chinese, and influence investment preferences and motivations.

This dissertation considers two important issues relevant to the efficiency of institutional investment managers. It examines the trading behaviour of institutional equity funds in relation to investment style drift and dividend payments to assess whether trading is beneficial to investors in these funds. The analysis of investment style is relevant because of the prominence of multiple manager funds in Australia, while institutional investor preferences for dividend income will impact the after-tax return of fund investors. Firstly, monthly equity fund portfolio holdings are used to examine the magnitude of investment style drift. Institutional investor style tilts are consistent with their self-stated investment objective. Decomposing style drift into active and passive components reveals that institutions retain a desired portfolio tilt by actively adjusting their portfolio holdings in response to passive style drift. Furthermore, funds are most responsive to changes in book-to-market and momentum drift, with style drift affecting portfolio turnover. Secondly, the dissertation presents an equilibrium framework of dividend valuation and ex-dividend trading under Australia??s imputation tax system. An examination of returns, volume, and order imbalance in the Australian equity market shows that investors value dividends. The results are consistent with long-term investors accelerating trades to the cum-dividend period and short-term traders targeting fully franked, high yielding dividends with a small bid-ask spread. Franking credits possess a positive value for the majority of the sample while transaction costs impede the efficient adjustment of prices on the ex-dividend day. The results show that a 45-day holding period rule reduces the amount of short-term trading from July 1999. Thirdly, the dissertation places the ex-dividend trading behaviour of institutional equity funds in the context of the findings for the Australian equity market. Institutions accelerate their sales of long-term holdings to the cum-dividend period, and delay purchases until the ex-dividend period to avoid dividends. Institutional trading is consistent with the provision of liquidity to short-term traders that are attempting to capture both dividends and franking credits. The introduction of a long-term capital gains tax discount in 1999 entices institutions to trade in a more tax-efficient manner by selling long-term holdings prior to the ex-dividend day.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Business Administration. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-181). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR19850

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, August, 2008. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Empirical findings on herding behavior among institutional investors suggest that those market participants speed up the price adjustment to new information and as such stabilize stock prices. Other findings indicate the opposite, that institutional herds drive stock prices away from fundamental values, and thus destabilize stock prices. This study examines the effect that Swedish institutional investors have on the stock prices on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. More precisely, we analyze the relationship of institutional herding with future excess stock returns. Major findings from this paper suggest that persistent herding among Swedish institutional investors leads to future long-term return reversals, which to some extent indicates a destabilizing influence at long horizons.

No description available.

This paper will analyze the usefulness of depreciation expense to investors. Depreciation expense is a broad allocation accounting practice that treats different types of assets the same. I argue that there are two types of industries: those with wasting assets, and those with real property. The first type experiences true deprecation and deterioration while the second type of asset does not. A simplified model using the earnings response coefficient will measure the relationship between earnings and returns for these different industries; this measurement is a way to quantify usefulness of accounting information. I hypothesize that investors of companies with high wasting assets will find depreciation more useful than those invested in companies with more real property. However, the results were not consistent with my hypothesis – depreciation did not matter more to investors of the industry with high wasting assets. The data set only included two distinct industries, which limited the sample size considerably, and might explain the results. Alternatively, the two groups of assets could be defined more broadly to include more industries for future research.

The decision to restructure a firm is very difficult for many companies because it often has a big impact on the company financially and culturally. Restructuring is often a necessary decision for firms in financial distress, and my research seeks to determine whether the market reacts positively or negatively to restructuring charges over time. Much research has been done to determine whether restructuring creates value for the company and increases future performance, but less has been done to determine the stock market reaction that comes as a result of restructuring. Prior literature suggests that restructuring is often a positive decision for companies, which led to my hypothesis that stock price would increase more in companies that had higher levels of restructuring charges over the period measured. I measured companies’ restructuring charges as a percent of operating income over a ten-year period and compared those percentages to the change in stock price over that same period. My results suggest that companies who did not restructure, or recognized lower levels of restructuring charges, had higher positive increases in stock price than those that had higher levels of restructuring charges. Because this result is contrary to much of the prior research, investors’ reaction to restructuring should continue to be studied.