The present thesis is an empirical investigation into various aspects of the functioning of financial markets. The first chapter includes two studies of the behaviour of the stock market: in the first one, the reaction to announcements of rights issues is analysed and several hypotheses are tested for a sample of UK companies. In the second study a switching regression model is applied to aggregate stock price data to see if a two-states model is better able to describe the behaviour of stock market prices. The second chapter investigates the empirical relationship between managerial ownership of shares and corporate performance, using a panel dataset of UK manufacturing companies. The two measures of performance investigated are: market valuation, as expressed by Tobin's Q, and total factor productivity growth, measured by estimating a production function. The explicit consideration of companies with dual structures of voting rights enables me to study the effects of a disparity in the ownership of equity and votes by managers, and the effects of the concentration of voting rights which is made possible by departures from one share-one vote. Finally, the ability of technical analysis to predict future price behaviour is analysed in the third chapter which consists of three studies. The first reports the results of an experiment in which a Chartist product has been tested for its ability to help users to predict future asset price movements. The second analyses the behaviour of three major exchange rates around support and resistance levels. The third tests two competing theories for their ability to explain the clustering observed in quoted prices. The approach used in this study of technical analysis differs from the previous ones since it employs inputs provided by technical analysts themselves and subjects them to empirical analysis, rather than trying to reproduce the 'data generation process' of technical analysts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:645395 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Curcio, Riccardo |
| Publisher | London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2435/ |
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