This paper investigates the stock returns and volatility size effects for firm performance in the Taiwan tourism industry, especially the impacts arising from the tourism policy reform that allowed mainland Chinese tourists to travel to Taiwan. Four conditional univariate GARCH models are used...

In this study, we use data from the Federal Reserve’s 1993, 1998 and 2003 Surveys of Small Business Finances to classify small businesses into four groups based upon their credit needs and to model the credit allocation process into a sequence of three steps. First, do firms need credit? We...

We investigate contagion effects in the stock returns of life insurance companies at the time of announcements by First Executive and Travelers of significant problems in their investment portfolios. We first demonstrate that investments in junk bonds or commercial mortgages are important for...

Commercial real estate makes up a relatively small percentage of most institutional portfolios, even though the existing literature has consistently reported attractive risk-return characteristics that would suggest much larger allocations. The discrepancy has been explained by a perceived lack...

In this study, we use data on intra-day transactions to analyze whether REIT liquidity as measured by the bid-ask spread changed from 1990 to 1994, a period during which the industry's market capitalization increased from $9 billion to $45 billion. We find that REIT spreads narrowed...

Bhasin, Cole, and Kiely (1997) document significant increases in REIT liquidity from 1990 to 1994 as measured by a narrowing of the percentage bid-ask spread. However, they measure the average spread in each year across all firms in the industry. In this article, I demonstrate that when the...

Restrictions on the ownership structure of a public company may harm the company's performance by preventing owners from choosing the best structure. We examine the stock-price performance and ownership structure, before and after the expiration of anti-takeover regulations, of a sample of...

Agency theory suggests that many of the costs incurred by the taxpayer during the 1980s thrift crisis were the result of conflicts between principals and their agents. This study models thrift failure costs as a function of three distinct types of agency conflicts: conflicts between creditors...

We identify and analyze a sample of publicly traded Chinese firms that issued loan guarantees to their related parties (usually the controlling block holders), thereby expropriating wealth from minority shareholders. Our results show that the issuance of related guarantees is less likely at...

We examine stock returns for a sample of publicly traded Chinese firms around announcements of block share transfers from government agencies to corporatized firms where the State is the ultimate controlling shareholder. We provide evidence that these transfers improve corporate governance and...