We examine underlying factors that explain an exceptionally low stock market participation rate among Lithuanian households by carrying out a comprehensive survey of mass affluent individuals. The probit regression analysis of the survey results indicates that lack of financial literacy, low...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...

We investigate the long-run holding returns of the stocks listed on eight Japanese stock exchanges with weekly return data from 1977 through 2007. We find existence of significant positive autocorrelations for the smallest and the middle quintile portfolios from the variance ratio test, but not...

The divergence of opinion model originally proposed by Miller (1977) has recently received a great deal of attention. Focusing on the unique offering process of Japanese seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), we are able to directly test the Miller model. A comparable analysis cannot be performed on...

In the late 1990s, the Japanese government initiated a number of reforms that resulted in lower transaction costs and made the Japanese equity market more attractive for foreign institutions. Following these changes, foreign institutional holdings more than doubled, providing an opportunity to...