This paper reports evidence that the standard deviation of stock returns exhibits seasonal patterns. The seasonal patterns are considerably different between portfolios of different market value of equity stocks. January and August are the two most volatile months for the small decile portfolio...

Consistent with the predictions of Brennan and Thakor's (1990) model of shareholder preferences, we find that, on average, institutional shareholders are net sellers during share repurchases. After controlling for liquidity provision and characteristics investing, we find that a one standard...

We model the seasonal volatility of stock returns using GARCH specifications and size-sorted portfolios. Estimation results indicate that there are volatility differences between months and that these seasonal volatility patterns are conditional on firm size. Additionally, we find that seasonal...

As a part of the ongoing liberalization of the marketplace, Chinese regulators adopted the guideline called “Regulation of Equity Incentive Plans (trial)” to allow firms to provide employee incentives through employee stock option plans. Firms began initiating the plans in 2006. We...

We document strong positive correlation between changes in institutional ownership and returns measured over the same period. The result suggests that either institutional investors positive-feedback trade more than individual investors or institutional herding impacts prices more than herding...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a non-normality premium (NNP) to identify the extra return that will compensate an investor for a non-normal return distribution. The NNP quantifies the economic significance of non-normality to complement a statistical significance test of...