The primary investment objective of investors is to create their wealth which is reflected in the change of stock market price and dividend yield they receive over the investment period. Thus, investors need financial tools to assess and forecast company performance before making investment decisions. Traditionally, such accounting measures as Earnings Per Share (EPS), Return On Assets (ROA), Return On Equity (ROE) and Return On Sales (ROS) are basic tools for investors in Thailand to evaluate companies¡¦ performance in the stock market. Value based approaches such as Economic Value Added (EVA) and Market Value Added (MVA) are not widely known among investors yet. Therefore, this study aims to examine the explanatory power of various accounting measures (EPS, ROA, ROE and ROS ) and value based measures ( EVA and MVA ) on the stock returns. This study focuses on 190 sample companies which are representative of all listed companies in the years from 2006-2010 in terms of the spread of EPS and industry diversification. The empirical results indicate that accounting measures are more associated with stock returns than MVA and EVA respectively. Among accounting measures, ROA provides highest explanatory power on stock return although the analysis is done separately by sector. In contrast, the results for EVA appear in some sectors and are not consistent with the past research done in other stock markets including Thailand. Thus, the analysis is extended to examine the company characteristics that have relationship between EVA and stock return. The findings indicate that EVA tends to be associated with stock return in companies that have low book to market ratio. In terms of portfolio returns, typical investing styles, such as value and growth strategies still outperform the return from MVA and EVA strategies.

This paper focuses on stock markets, including Portugal¡BItaly¡BIreland¡BGreece and Spain, and these are named PIGS by economists. Furthermore, we add the other three countries, U.S.A.¡BU.K. and Germany in this paper for investigating the dependence structure in the stock markets between these countries during the period 2001-2011. We implement a regime-switching copula model based on Gaussian copula, which uses a GARCH specification for the marginal distributions and the Gaussian copula for the joint distribution. Our method combines copulas and regime-switching models to demonstrate dependence sructures in stock markets between these countries. Based on this paper, we have two reports for international investors. First, if the dependency changes over time, the returns of portfolio diversification may be prone to diversification disasters, and the international investors' degrees of diversification can cause higher systemic risk in the period of financial crisis. Second, the phonomenon of the asymmetric dependence exists in financial markets, and we conclude that non-diversification may be better than diversification in the period of financial crisis.

A recent outbreak of bird flu or avian influenza (AI), an especially highly pathogenic strain (HPAI) of H5N1, started in Hong Kong in January 2003 and caused 159 human deaths in Asia, Africa and Europe through early 2007. In addition, this outbreak resulted in millions of slaughtered birds and banned international trade of poultry meat in the infected countries. Such events harmed the poultry, tourism, and other related industries in the infected countries and changed the world poultry trade flow. Even in some uninfected countries, related industries were negatively affected. This study investigates the impact of bird flu outbreaks as manifested in financial markets within the US and Japan. The first essay explores how the avian influenza (AI) outbreaks impacted the security values of poultry-related firms. Using partial equilibrium analysis, this study infers that within a country AI outbreaks drop stock prices of poultry meat producers and raise stock prices of poultry food producers. Simultaneously, we infer that AI outbreaks in other poultry exporting countries raise stock prices of poultry meat producers and drop stock prices of poultry food producers. The empirical findings support our model results. Recent developments in time series method, directed graphs and search methods of cointegration rank are applied in this study. The second essay examines whether avian influenza outbreaks cause structural breaks in a model of their prices. It employs the dynamic programming algorithm and the reduced regression method for a cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) model to compute the break dates for the data sample. This research then compares the long run relation, and the short run relation and contemporaneous relation. The model estimations in these three sub-periods find these three sub-samples are significantly different. The breaks were caused by the invasion of Iraq on March 2003 and the 20 Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) induced ban of Canadian live cattle imports to the US on 03 March 2005, not by avian influenza outbreaks in early 2004. The third essay explores the effects of the avian influenza announcement in Japan on the prices of agricultural commodity futures contracts traded in Japan. Both the VAR model with asymmetric generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) terms and the event study methods were used to examine whether avian influenza outbreaks significantly affected these markets. Our findings point out that the avian influenza outbreak only impacted the egg futures contract. These three essays found that outbreaks of avian influenza have significant impact on poultry-related stock prices and futures markets. The examined impacts changed the movement of those financial equity prices in the short run, but not in the long run. Research showed investors and poultry-related producers still encounter huge financial risk and loss.

As the trading volume in TURKDEX, the first and only options and futures exchange in Turkey, increases, it becomes more important to have an understanding of the effect of stock index futures trading on the underlying spot market volatility. In this respect, this thesis analyzes the effect of ISE-National 30 index futures contract trading on the underlying stocks&rsquo / volatility. In this thesis, spot portfolio volatility is decomposed into two components and this decomposition is applied to a single-factor return-generating model to focus on the relationships among the volatility components rather than on the components in isolation. In order to measure the average volatility and the cross-sectional dispersion of the component securities and the portfolio volatility for each day in the sample period, a simple filtering procedure to recover a series of realized volatilities from a discrete time realization of a continuous time diffusion process is used. Results reveal that inception of futures trading has no significant effect on the volatility of the underlying ISE National 30 index stock market.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the probable effects of integration with European stock markets on stock market in Turkey as an acceding country. The required changes in Turkey&rsquo / s legal framework and economic effects on Turkish stock market have been examined by reference to the current legal framework of the EU and the measures that can be defined as reform within the dynamic integration process of the EU. It is determined that adopting the legal framework of the EU will have numerous effects on all the parties involved in the stock market, namely / stock exchange, financial intermediaries, firms and investors, leading to a pro-competitive environment, the end result of which is likely to be an increase in the share of the stock market in the national economy and a positive growth effect for the economy as a whole.

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the factors playing a key role in the determination of the Turkish stock market liquidity in aggregate terms in a time series context and discuss the joint dynamics of the market-wide liquidity with its selected determinants and the trade volume. The main determinants tested are the level of return, the return volatility and the monetary stance of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey. The expected positive relationship between the liquidity and the return is confirmed, while the negative effect of the volatility on liquidity appears one-week later. The behavior of various liquidity variables are also examined around the macroeconomic data announcement dates, during the 2008 financial crisis, and after the tick size change in the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE). The time series dynamics between the trade volume, return, volatility and the liquidity are put forward within the Vector Autoregression analysis framework. The GARCH modeling of the return series, which is an input to the liquidity model estimations, is a byproduct of this thesis. It is observed that the return series exhibits volatility clustering, persistence, leverage effects and mean reversion. In addition, while the level of the ISE market return decreased, the volatility of the return increased during the 2008 crisis. Accordingly, EGARCH model assuming normally distributed error terms and allowing a shift in the variance during the crisis period is chosen as the best model.

The application of the internet technology on securities markets has been increasing over recent years, so is the influence it has caused on the way the stock market is operated. There is no doubt that internet technology is changing the access between investors and issuing firms, as well as the access between investors and exchanges. How would this affect the stock market microstructure? Little study has been done thus far in this regard, and, as far as we know, none has looked into the issue of IPOs on internet and its related impact on IPO returns. In addition to the impact on the primary market, internet tradings also have immense impact on the underlying performance of the secondary market. The purposes of this study are mainly twofold:(1) To explore the related issues in IPOs or DPOs on internet, e.g., the disclosure requirements, the restriction of investors, and the effect it has on IPO discounts,(2) To empirically test how the internet trading affects the daily and intraday performance (i.e., liquidity, volatility and efficiency) of the market.This is the first study attempting to examine the pricing issue of IPOs on the internet. We hope to compare the returns of initial public offerings on the internet with those of the traditional IPOs and analyze the differences, if any. In addition to provide useful analyses to the security authority on DPOs or IPOs on internet, the result of this study should contribute to our understanding of the market microstructure.

This study mainly investgates the investment performance of momentum strategies and contrarian strategies in Taiwan stock market. There are three purposes in this paper. First, we examine whether the momentum strategies and contrarian strategies can create significant profits under different formulation horizons and holding horizons, then we discuss the reasons for the profits of significant profits strategies, including risk, seasonality, industrial momentum, time series predictability of stock returns and cross-sectional variation in the mean returns, and stock underreation, overreaction, and random walk. Second, we derive the mix strategies from the combination of momentum strategies and contrarian strategies for the same holding horizons and test the investment performance of mix strategies empirically. Finally, we study whether the investment strategies of stock mutual funds in Taiwan are industrial momentum strategies or industrial contrarian strategies, and which strategies can create better industrial investment performance. The main conclusions and suggestions are as follows: First, we find the momentum strategies are more successful in Taiwan as a whole, especially from 1991/1/1 to 2000/12/31. There are only three significant profits strategies in 147 strategies totally for three different test periods, including the (24,24) strategy and (36,24) strategy from 1991/1/1 to 2000/12/31, and (1,12) strategy from 1981/1/1 to 1990/12/31. For the reasons of the profits of the three strategies, we find the negative alphas in the F&F three factors model and underreation from the decreasing returns in the post holding horizons, so we should use the momentum strategies very carefully in Taiwan stock market. Second, we find the success of mix strategies theoretically and empirically. Nevertheless, we can¡¦t increase the profits for considering more different sub-strategies if there are no successful sub-strategies with different formulation horizons. Finally, we find the investment strategies of stock mutual funds almost are industrial momentum strategies, which realized significantly better industrial performance then the industrial contrarian strategies. It suggests that the industrial momentum strategies are not irrational and can increase the speed of adjustment of industrial index to its intrinsic value. On the other hand, stock mutual funds can perform well by the momentum strategies without superior information collection and analysis.

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Dividend Valuation Model is a well-known stock pricing model. However, many empirical studies of foreign stock markets do not support the Dividend Valuation Model; most of these studies think stock price is too volatile to explain by expected dividend. Therefore, this article would like to use Stochastic Cointegration to reexamining Taiwan stock market, and observe whether Taiwan stock market supports Dividend Valuation Model. The empirical results showed that stock price and dividends exist a positive comovements relationship in the plastic, steel, electronic, and the banking & insurance industries, but empirical results does not completely support the theoretical value of cointegration vector. Therefore, this study has not been sufficient evidence to support Taiwan stock market is efficient.