The way in which market participants form expectations affects the dynamic properties of financial asset prices and therefore the appropriateness of different econometric tools used for empirical asset pricing. In addition to standard rational expectations models, this thesis studies a class of...

In Chinese culture, certain digits are lucky and others unlucky. We test how such numerological superstition affects financial decision in the China IPO market. We find that the frequency of lucky numerical stock listing codes exceeds what would be expected by chance. Also consistent with...

This study explores the volatility models and evaluates the quality of one-step ahead forecasts of volatility constructed by (1) GARCH, (2) TGARCH, (3) Risk metrics and (4) Historical volatility. Volatility forecasts suggest that TGARCH performs relatively best in term of MSPE, followed by...

The valuation of synergy is vital to the success of any merger, however, given current valuation methodologies and the complexity of the task; it is also the most challenging element of merger and acquisition pricing. Conventional valuation methods assume that sales figures and market share of...

In this paper, I have examined the relation between expected returns and measures of systematic risk stemming from macroeconomic factors studied by Chen, Roll and Ross (1986, hereafter CRR) for a different time period (1978-2007) and different formation of portfolios (based on ME and BE/ME)....

In this paper we consider the equilibrium effects of an institutional investor whose performance is benchmarked to an index. In a partial equilibrium setting, the objective of the institutional investor is modeled as the maximization of expected utility (an increasing and concave function, in...

In this paper, we address the question whether the impact of default risk on equity returns depends on the financial system firms operate in. Using an implementation of Merton's option-pricing model for the value of equity to estimate firms' default risk, we construct a factor that measures the...