We examine the relation between minority shareholder protection laws, ownership concentration, and board independence. Minority shareholder rights is a country-level governance variable. Ownership structure and board composition represent firm-level governance variables. Prior research...

Using brokerage account data from China, we study investment decision making in an emerging market. We find that Chinese investors make poor trading decisions: the stocks they purchase underperform those they sell. We also find that Chinese investors suffer from three behavioral biases: (i) they...

This paper tests the relation between intellectual collaboration and the quality of the intellectual output using academic papers published in prestigious finance journals during 1988-2005. We use the number of authors of a paper to measure the extent of intellectual collaboration and the number...

We analyze market liquidity (i.e., spreads and depths) and quote clustering using data from the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE), where the tick size increases with share price in a stepwise fashion. We find that stocks that are subject to larger mandatory tick sizes have wider spreads and...

Using a sample of over 3,000 seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) from 1983 to 1998, we test the hypothesis that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Rule 10b-21, which disallows the covering of short positions with newly issued SEOs, makes pre-offer stock prices less informative, which, in...

Initial margin requirements represent: (1) a cost impediment to the wealth constrained investor and (2) a potential way of mitigating excessive volatility. However, prior empirical research finds that margins are not an effective tool in reducing volatility. We consider the possibility that...

We examine the effect of corporate governance structure on the relation between ownership structure and financial leverage among Japanese firms. Under normal conditions, no significant relation between ownership variables and financial leverage exists. When firms signal financial difficulties,...

Price limit advocates claim that price limits decrease stock price volatility, counter overreaction, and do not interfere with trading activity. Conversely, price limit critics claim that price limits cause higher volatility levels on subsequent days (volatility spillover hypothesis), prevent...

Using a sample of over 3,000 seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) from 1983 to 1998, we find significant SEO discounts (underpricing) during the 1990s, but not during the 1980s. The natural question is: Why do we observe a difference between the 1980s and 1990s? Among the different explanations that...

We examine stock return predictability in China. We take 18 firm-specific variables that have been documented to predict cross-sectional stock returns in the U.S. and examine their relation with stock returns in China for the sample period from 1995 to 2007. We find relatively weak...