This research mainly tries to confirm the relationship between distress risk and stock returns in the Taiwan market. According to three factor theory raised by Fama-French (1992), the higher book-to-market ratio brings higher stock returns because of the higher distress risk, and also mentioned about the three significant factors in explaining expected stock return: risk, firm size, and book-to-market ratio (here replace it with price-to-book ratio). There are many studies had proved that high risk accompanies high expected stock return, but some other obtained the contrary outcome. It still depends on different characteristics of enterprises, industries, and countries. Following other researches, this paper use ¡§Z-Score¡¨ bankruptcy prediction model as the proxy of distress risk, and take the subsequent realized stock returns of the distress publicly-traded firms as a proxy of systematic risk. As it may be doubted of using Z-Score in the Taiwan stock market, this research add ¡§TCRI¡¨ to compare with. ¡§TCRI¡¨ is the credit rating score raised by Taiwan Economic Journal (TEJ). Because of the same results of rating on sample companies, it supported the application of Z-Score in Taiwan stock market. In analyzing the relationship between distress risk and stock return, this research find that firm size, distress risk and price-to-book ratio effect are significant enough to explain the expected stock return,(although distress risk and price-to-book ratio are only significant in Y-3) similar to the findings of Fazilah Samad (2009) et al. This research also found that the theoretical expectation of the size effect on distress risk does not hold in the case of the Taiwan distress publicly-traded firms, but price-to-market ratio (PB ratio) does. Unlike the findings of Fazilah Samad (2009) et al. and Griffin and Lemmon (2002), the outcome shows that there is a significant inverse relationship between PB ratio and distress risk, similar to the theory and our original expectation. It directly proved that the lower PB ratio brings higher distress risk in Taiwan market, but inconclusive to deduce that it also brings higher stock return. Meanwhile, this research tries to find out if there is a difference between distress companies and most distress companies. Besides of firm size, there is no significant difference between these two groups, and they are similar as it was closer to distress happened. Although there is not significant relationship between three factors and stock return, this study reveals the decreasing trend of financial performance among those distress firms before facing distress circumstances. It shows again that Z-Score is suitable for Taiwan market although our sample companies including manufacturing and non-manufacturing companies.

Quantitative analysis is one branch of portfolio management. The advantages of quantitative analysis are fast and objective. It has developed significantly in recent years because of the improvements in computer technology. This thesis applies the structure of a multi-factor model (MFM) to undertake quantitative analysis. Singapore has one of the most prosperous financial markets in Southeast Asia. The Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) and Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange (FTSE) are now in cooperation, which has added vitality to this market. It has great influence in global financial markets, and this is why we select its security market to be our target in MFM. The model refers the multi-factor processes of Jeng and Tsai (2011) . For backtesting, we adopt an enhanced strategy as testimony. We transmit information from the MFM to the enhanced strategy. Then we create the stock weightings to constitute the enhanced portfolio. This model includes 68 significant descriptors, 14 composite factors and 7 industry factors. The Singapore MFM shows 43% adjusted R-Square in the sample period. The enhanced portfolio we suggested has an information ratio of 76.80% with a tracking error of 4.02% and 1.53% for monthly turnover rate.

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.

Abstract It has long been Taiwan¡¦s primary goal to be the Asia-Pacific financial center, especially after joining WTO, the internationalization of stock exchange, finance, and economy has undoubtedly become an inevitable trend. After Taiwan ensured the policy goals of financial liberalization, internationalization, as well as building Taiwan into an Asia-Pacific operation center in the mid-1980s, government has gradually eased financial restrictions and scrapped limits on foreign investment in the domestic stock market to expand and stabilize stock market through opening to foreign investment, and to direct investors toward rational trading through professional analysis of foreign investment capital. Although foreign capital inflow can strengthen stock market which helps accelerate economic development and internationalization; nevertheless, Mexico¡¦s and Asia¡¦s financial crisis in 1990s due to the abolishment of restrictions on capital movement, turned the policy of easing restrictions on foreign participation in the stock exchange into a double-edged sword. That is to say, while it is easier for enterprises to finance business and expand total demands to accelerate economic growth, the excessive foreign capital movement may impact domestic economy and finance, causing rapid expansion of capital and credit, inflation, as well as appreciation of real exchange rate. This study attempts to explore the dynamic effect of fundamental and stock trading factors on the stock¡¦s return rate after government eased restrictions on foreign participation in the stock exchange at the third stage of entirely opening to foreign investment. The results include that first, after the third stage of opening to foreign investment, foreign capital inflow actually causes the validity of exchange rate and monetary supply to influence stock¡¦s return rate, which changes the interpretation on the cause-and-effect of stock¡¦s return rate. Second, shortened reaction time on the impact of fundamental and trading factors on stock¡¦s return rate can rapidly reflect on stock¡¦s return rate, which helps stabilize stock market. And finally, the decomposition of forecast error variance verifies that financial internationalization indeed structurally changes how Taiwan¡¦s macroeconomic environment interprets stock¡¦s return rate. Moreover, as for trading behavior, the influence of the more speculative trading credit on stock¡¦s return rate decreases, and the foreign capital deregulation helps stabilize stock market. Key word: foreign investment, stock return, fundamental factor, trading factor, unit root, VAR

The corporate scandals in the beginning of the 21st century caused distrust in the market and a pressure for more disclosure to increase transparency. To broaden the traditional reporting, companies started to voluntarily disclose information regarding soft measures like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Due to the fast development and popularity of CSR, more companies started to disclose a separate sustainability report to communicate information about these activities. The aim of the report is to provide stakeholders with accurate and transparent information regarding the companies CSR activities, but also to legitimize the business. The main purpose of this research is to investigate if the quantity of information disclosed in the sustainability report affects the financial performance of companies listed on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm. We also aim to investigate whether the existence of a report affects the financial performance. With companies spending an increasing amount of resources on disclosing voluntary information it is important to extend the research regarding CSR and the benefits to financial performance. This research ontological and epistemological positions are objectivism and positivism with a deductive approach. A quantitative method was used to gather sufficient data from existing databases and reports. For the first research question our population is all companies listed on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm on April 12th 2013, and for the second research question our population is the companies with a separate sustainability report in English from the accounting year of 2011. The financial performance data was gathered from the period 2012-04-01-2013-03.31. To answer our research questions and sub- questions, six hypotheses were formulated based on relevant theories and previous studies. Several multiple linear regression analyses were performed to examine the relationship between the existence of the reports, and the quantity of information in them, to the company’s financial performance. Other regressions were performed to establish if the quantity disclosed was affected by industry classification or market capitalization size. Our results show that the neither the existence of a separate sustainability report nor the quantity of information disclosed in it has an effect on stock return. However, both having a separate sustainability and the quantity of information disclosed have a positive effect on stock volatility. Conclusively, companies do not benefit financially from disclosing their CSR activities through a separate sustainability report.

This paper examines how the level and volatility of interest rates affect the stock return of banks using a GARCH-M model. Data is collected for Swedish and Danish banks stock return and interest rates on monthly basis for the period January 2000 to April 2018. The effects of interest rates on banks stock return is tested by two hypotheses, if the volatility of interest rates affects the volatility of the stock returns and if the level of the interest rate affects the excess return. The excess returns are also tested for significance of its own conditional variance in form of the mean term in the GARCH-M model. The results show that the volatility of interest rates has a significant effect on the excess return of the bank stocks while the level of the interest rate does not have a significant effect, the mean term is not significant, implying that some of the risk is not priced by an increased risk premium. The paper also discusses how the quantitative easing activities that has been performed by central banks could affect the bank stocks sensitivity to interest rates changes.

This thesis includes three essays on topics related to the predictability of market returns. I investigate i) the predictability of market returns from an adjusted version of cay ratio (cayadj), ii) the explanatory power of a conditional version of the consumption-CAPM which uses predictor variables to scale the pricing kernel, and iii) whether information about future market returns can be extracted from a large set of commodity data. The first essay studies the predictive ability of cayadj . In Campbell and Mankiw (1989), the consumption-wealth ratio is represented as a linear function of expected market returns and consumption growth. Lettau and Ludvigson (2001) build their study on Campbell and Mankiw (1989) and estimate the ratio cay as a proxy for the consumption-wealth ratio, assuming that the fluctuation in expected consumption growth is constant. I argue that the variation in expected consumption growth should be taken into consideration and propose adjusting the cay ratio by the estimates of expected consumption growth. After making the adjustment, I find that the predictabilities of market returns, particularly at annual, bi-annual, and tri-annual horizons, are greatly improved. The significant predictive ability of cayadj still holds in out-of-sample forecasts. The second essay examines the performance of a conditional version of the consumption-CAPM, where conditioning variables are used to scale the pricing kernel. I find that incorporating the conditioning information into the standard consumption-CAPM greatly improves the performance in asset pricing tests, particularly when using cayadj as the conditioning variable. Moreover, the performance of conditional consumption-CAPM is as good as the ultimate consumption risk model (Parker and Julliard, 2005) which measures the consumption risk over several quarters. Further tests show that the factors of conditional consumption-CAPM drive out the consumption risk measured over several quarters. The third essay evaluates the ability of lagged commodity returns to forecast market returns. In order to exploit the predictive information from a relatively large amount of commodity returns, I apply the partial-least-squares (PLS) method pioneered by Kelly and Pruitt (2013). I find that the commodity returns measured over previous twelve months show strong predictive power in monthly and three-month forecasts, in-sample and out-of-sample. The findings are robust to controlling for risk factors such as momentum, Fama-French three factors and industry returns previously identified to be significant predictors of market returns (Hong, Torous and Valkanov, 2007).

<p>In Chapter 1, I construct a new proxy for Tobin's q that incorporates the replacement cost of patent capital. This proxy, PI (physical plus intangible) q, explains up to 64\% more variation in investment than other proxies for q. Furthermore, investment is more sensitive to PI q than to other proxies for q. Although investment is predicted more accurately by, and is more sensitive to, PI q, controlling for PI q leads to relatively higher, not lower, cash flow coefficients. All results are stronger in subsamples with more patent capital. Overall, using PI q strengthens the historically weak investment-q relation.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Chapter 2 includes Noah Stoffman and M. Deniz Yavuz as co-authors, and in this chapter, we find that small innovators (i.e., small, innovative firms) earn higher returns than small non-innovators for up to five years. We find no such innovative premium among large firms. A battery of tests shows that our results are explained by risk, not investor underreaction. Small innovators are especially risky because they focus more on risky product innovation and rely more on organization capital that amplifies their systematic risk. In addition, small innovators contribute significantly to the size premium. Overall, small innovators have a higher cost of equity, which potentially explains why they rely heavily on internal capital.</p>

In the first essay, I examine stock market implications of state-to-state migration flows that are known to provide the basis for social and business networks. I observe sizeable and robust excess return comovement between migration-flow receiving and sending states at both the individual stock and the state portfolio levels. Although I find that migration flows are associated with firms’ business activities, this comovement is not fully explained by economic fundamentals and decreases substantially when firms relocate to other states. In line with the view that migration networks form the basis for a common investor base for receiving and sending states stocks, I find that a) receiving states account for a significant portion of sending states stocks’ trading volume, and b) migration comovement is strongly correlated with the percent of local population born in migration states and more prevalent in states where retail investors display “old home” bias in addition to local bias. Moreover, consistent with the view that migration comovement may be rooted in sentiment shared by a common investor base, I find that it coexists with mispricing, measured by stock return reversals. In the second essay, I test whether takeover targets are more likely to be connected to bidders via domestic migration network by relating acquisitions with the availability of social and business networks formed via interstate migration flows. I find that targets are more likely to be from the migration sending states when migration networks are sturdier. Additionally, I find that targets are more likely to be from migration sending states with stronger migration network a) when acquirer and targets are in different industries, b) when migration network involves non-neighboring states, and c) when targets are small. The results are consistent with the notion that information advantage is at least a partial explanation of firms’ propensity to choose targets from migration sending states, especially when information asymmetry about target is more pronounced. Moreover, I find that takeover premium is smaller and acquirer announcement returns are higher when migration sending states targets are small with low institutional ownership, which substantiate the view that migration networks present enhanced accessibility of soft information to acquirers and that the effect of such information advantage is valuable when there is substantial degree of information asymmetry regarding targets.

How banks set the mortgage interest rates and the sizes of the mortgage margins they obtain from making mortgage loans always attract attention from households, government authorities, politicians and market actors. This thesis studies the relationship between Swedish mortgage interest rates and mortgage lending institutions’ costs of obtaining funds, and how the gross margins of mortgage interest rates influence the banks stock returns. In general, banks’ mortgage margins are correlated with their funding costs, which are typically reflected in the yields of mortgage bonds (covered bonds), interbank rates (STIBOR) and the repo rate. How-ever the correlations change over time and sometimes the mortgage margins are relatively low and sometimes relatively high. Since mortgage loans play an important role in banks’ lending business, the related interest rate margins should influence banks’ profitability and therefore the performance of their stock. Everything else equal, higher margins should result in higher stock returns. I have collected and constructed a time-series data set based on Swedbank mortgage rates, Swedbank stock prices, yields on government bonds, yields on mortgage bonds, STIBOR interest rates, and repo rate. Both descriptive analysis and econometric models are applied to analyze the time-varying characteristics of the financial data. The thesis covers unconditional correlation (Pearson correlations), and conditional correlation through applying DCC-GARCH models. Besides, ARCH and GARCH models are employed to measure the ARCH and GARCH effects of the spread (premium) terms between interest rates. The results from descriptive analysis and econometric models present the tight relationships between the mortgage interest rates and the corresponding funding costs, and show the posi-tive but low correlations between mortgage margins and bank’s stock returns. The results also support the existence of time-vary volatilities (risk) of spread (premium) terms and quantify the growth of return for the certain increase in risk taking.