We examine the volume-return relationship of individual stocks around the world. We frame our empirical investigation in the context of the heterogeneous agent, rational expectations, framework proposed by Llorente, Michaely, Saar, and Wang (2002) in which investors trade to speculate on their...

This paper develops and tests a model of how country characteristics, such as legal protections for minority investors and the level of economic and financial development, influence firms' costs and benefits in implementing measures to improve their own governance and transparency. We show that...

The objective of this article is to outline what we, as researchers, know and, more importantly, what we do not yet know about the consequences of terrorism for financial markets. I argue that a number of the efforts used to assess quantitatively the risk of terrorist attacks are limited in...

This paper investigates how a foreign firm's decision to cross-list on a U.S. stock exchange is related to the consumption of private benefits of control by its controlling shareholders. Theory has proposed that when private benefits are high, controlling shareholders are less likely to choose...

We study return volatility and trading volume at times of earnings announcements to see if the increased disclosure faced by non-U.S. firms when listing shares in the U.S. has economically significant consequences. We find a surprising change in market behavior around earnings releases: absolute...

For years, there has prevailed a conventional wisdom rationalizing why firms pursue overseas listings. It argues that firms seek such opportunities to benefit from a lower cost of capital that arises, because its shares become more accessible to global investors whose access would otherwise be...

In this paper, we develop and test a theoretical model of multi-market trading to explain the differences in the foreign share of trading volume of internationally cross-listed stocks. The model derives an equilibrium which predicts that, under fairly general conditions, the distribution of...

On February 19, 2001, the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission announced that Chinese residents would be allowed to own B-share classes of stocks traded on both the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets. These share classes were previously restricted to foreign investors while domestic...

We study return volatility and trading volume at times of earnings announcements to see if the increased disclosure faced by non-U.S. firms when listing shares in the U.S. has economically significant consequences. We find a surprising change in market behavior around earnings releases: absolute...

This article surveys the various definitions and taxonomies of international financial contagion in the academic literature and popular press and relates it to the existing evidence on comovements in international asset prices, on the growth and volatility of international capital flows and on...