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Full-Text Articles in Business

Is Stock Price Rounded For Economic Reasons In The Chinese Market, Yan He, Chunchi Wu Sep 2006

Is Stock Price Rounded For Economic Reasons In The Chinese Market, Yan He, Chunchi Wu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper investigates whether trading and quoting prices are rounded for both economic and cultural reasons on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges in China. We find that the close, bid, and ask prices of domestic shares are rounded to the nearest 10s and 5s for economic reasons, and the last decimal point of prices clusters on 8 for cultural reasons. The cross-sectional variation in 10-cent and 5-cent rounding can be well explained by price and inverse of square root of trading volume, whereas the clustering on 8 can hardly be ascribed to economic variables. The cross-sectional variation in execution …


Which Daily Price Is Less Noisy?, Christopher Ting Sep 2006

Which Daily Price Is Less Noisy?, Christopher Ting

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The daily efficient price is the price that would prevail if the market were frictionless. I show that volume-weighted average price (VWAP) provides a less noisy estimate for the unobservable efficient price as compared to the closing price. The variance of daily returns computed with VWAPs is smaller than that computed with closing prices. The difference between these two realized variances is economically significant. The volatility of log closing price change tends to understate the beta risk and Sharpe ratio. A higher noise level in the closing price leads to derivative prices that favor option and volatility-related swap writers.


Personal Taxes, Endogenous Default, And Corporate Bond Yield Spreads, Sheen X. Liu, Howard Qi, Chunchi Wu Jun 2006

Personal Taxes, Endogenous Default, And Corporate Bond Yield Spreads, Sheen X. Liu, Howard Qi, Chunchi Wu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Term structure models have often been criticized for failing to explain satisfactorily the yield spread between corporate and Treasury bonds. A potential problem is that the personal tax effect is ignored in these models. In this paper, we employ a structural model to investigate the role of personal taxes on both debt and equity returns in capital structure decisions and assess their impact on corporate bond yield spreads. It is shown that personal taxes affect the firm's optimal capital structure, and the tax premium explains a substantial portion of yield spreads, especially for high-grade bonds. The predictive ability of the …


Do Accurate Earnings Forecasts Facilitate Superior Investment Recommendations?, Roger Loh, G. Mujtaba Mian May 2006

Do Accurate Earnings Forecasts Facilitate Superior Investment Recommendations?, Roger Loh, G. Mujtaba Mian

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We find that analysts who issue more accurate earnings forecasts also issue more profitable stock recommendations. The average factor-adjusted return associated with the recommendations of analysts in the highest accuracy quintile exceeds the corresponding return for analysts in the lowest accuracy quintile by 1.27% per month. Our findings provide indirect empirical support for valuation models in the accounting and finance literatures (e.g., Ohlson, 1995) that emphasize the role of future earnings in predicting stock price movements. Our results also suggest that imperfectly efficient markets reward information gatherers, such as security analysts, for their costly activities in generating superior earnings forecasts.


Capital Structure Dynamics And Stock Returns, Jie Cai, Zhe Zhang Jan 2006

Capital Structure Dynamics And Stock Returns, Jie Cai, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Many finance theories predict that the capital structure affects firm value, which implies that the changes in leverage have an impact on stock returns. Most of the existing literature however has been focusing on the determinants of the capital structure. Using a sample of U.S. public firms during 1975-2002, we document a significantly negative effect of leverage changes on next-quarter stock returns. This effect remains significant after controlling for other firm characteristics such as ROE, book-to-market, firm size, and past returns. We propose and test several hypotheses to explain the observed effect. We find that the negative effect is stronger …