Market commentators have suggested that New Zealand's lax private placement and disclosure regulation allows private placement purchasers to immediately sell discounted shares without disclosing these transactions to the market. However, New Zealand firms with the deepest discounts tend to have...

This paper analyzes the risk dynamics surrounding convertible bond offerings (CBOs) and Seasoned Equity Offerings (SEOs). As convertible bonds are commonly believed to be very effective at mitigating adverse selection or overinvestment problems we would expect differing risk and return patterns...

We examine whether risk, timing or mispricing hypotheses can explain the underperformance of private and public equity issuers, in Canada, where both categories share several common characteristics. Adding an investment risk factor to the TFPM reduces, but does not eliminate, the...

This paper examines changes in corporate behavior around the 2003 modification to SEC Rule 10b-18, which mandates enhanced disclosure of repurchase transactions. Firms announce significantly fewer and slightly smaller open market repurchase plans in the enhanced disclosure environment. However,...

This paper studies the relationship between companies' choice of capital structure and their stock market returns from a corporate governance perspective. A portfolio buying low-levered, zero payout stocks and selling high-levered, zero payout stocks earned abnormal returns of 8.5% per year from...

The New Zealand market allows us to explore the effect of a less restrictive private placement regulatory environment compared to the US and other countries where private placements have already been examined. Examples include no resale restrictions on shares purchased through private placements...

This paper provides evidence of ratings shopping in the corporate bond market. By estimating systematic differences in agencies' biases about any given firm's bonds, I show that new bonds are more likely to be rated by agencies that are positively biased towards the firm---a pattern that is...

By exploring a natural experiment where the Chinese regulatory body introduced a dividend regulatory change, this paper investigates wealth effects of dividend regulation which increases firms' dividends. The efficient contract viewpoint of dividends suggests that the observed dividend level is...

Past research has revealed significant abnormal ex-date returns for stock dividends even though the ex-date is known in advance and the distribution contains no new information. Various researchers have suggested that odd-lot transaction costs faced by certain investors are the key driver in the...

Publicly traded companies distribute cash to shareholders primarily in two ways - either through dividends or through anonymous repurchases of the companies' own stock on the open market. Companies must announce a repurchase authorization, but do not actually have to repurchase any stock, and...