Narrow Results

This paper empirically tests Kim and Verrecchia's (1994, hereafter KV) theory that bid-ask spreads may increase around earnings announcements when information asymmetry increases between the informed traders and the less informed market-makers. Despite certain limitations, prior research has used analysts' earnings forecasts as a proxy for information asymmetry. I substitute the percentage of common stocks held by institutional investors as a more precise proxy for information asymmetry. Consistent with KV's proposition, I find (1) that bid-ask spreads increase at the time of earnings announcements, and (2) that bid-ask reactions to earnings announcements are significantly positively related to information asymmetry even after controlling for the effects of other cross-sectional determinants of spreads.

Empirical studies on the influence of tick-size reduction towards market liquidity have focused almost exclusively on quote-driven markets in developed nations, and generally their findings are based on time periods of less than one year. This work investigates the influence of tick-size reduction and the relaxations of binding-constraint probability on market liquidity in the Taiwanese stock market, an emerging order-driven market, starting on March 1, 2005. The empirical results show that the spread, depth, market liquidity, and binding-constraint probability all decrease following the tick-size reduction, especially for low-priced stocks. These results can be attributed to relaxation of binding constraints. Additionally, stocks that are frequently traded, have larger market capitalization, or have restrictive binding constraints, experience considerable declines in spread, depth, and market liquidity following tick-size reduction. Trading activity plays an important role in explaining changes in spread, depth, market liquidity, and binding constraints. Thus, tick-size reduction in the Taiwanese Stock Market can increase market efficiency and reduce the investors' trading costs.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the duration of the four-month period before the window dressing of Power Quotient International Co., LTD. (PQI) annual report between 2004 and 2005 was disclosed. The vultures sold 6,373,000 shares of PQI's stock based on the illegally obtained insider information. The empirical results indicate that the vultures' selling did not make PQI's stock price go down during insider period, but PQI's stock price did appear to rise and significantly exceeded the non-insider period. However, the proportion of vultures' selling is negatively correlated with the changes in PQI's stock price. The effect of vultures' selling is indifferent from the effect of non-vultures' selling during insider period. Market liquidity is also affected unfavorably in the presence of vultures' trading. Additionally, the newspaper's reports on PQI's positive or negative news significantly influence the investment decision of investors in Taiwan, and significantly influence the PQI's price changes and market liquidity.

Using a multi-dimensional model of corporate transparency developed by DeBoskey and Gillett (2011) based on disclosure information, intermediary information, earnings quality information, and insider information, this study extends their findings to examine whether corporate transparency has significant power to explain cross-sectional variation in market liquidity (measured by bid-ask spreads and market depth) and analyst forecast properties (measured by analyst forecast accuracy and analyst forecast dispersion). We find that: (i) market depth and analyst forecast dispersion are significantly associated with public disclosure information transparency; (ii) market depth, forecast dispersion and forecast error are significantly associated with intermediary information transparency; and (iii) relative bid-ask spreads is signficantly associated with earnings quality information. Our findings offer an extended view of the impact of corporate transparency on a set of criterion variables expanded beyond firm-level ones to include market participants such as dealers/specialists who rely to some extent on company-provided information.

The deterioration in credit quality of General Motors (GM) and Ford to junk status in the spring of 2005 caused a wide-spread sell-off in their corporate bonds. Using a novel dataset, we document that this sell-off appears to have generated significant liquidity risk for market-makers, as evidenced by a significant imbalance in their quotes towards sales. We find that simultaneously there was a substantial increase in the co-movement between innovations in the credit default swap (CDS) spreads of GM and Ford and those of firms in all other industries, the increase being the greatest during the period surrounding the actual downgrade and reversing sharply thereafter. We show that the corporate bond market makers' imbalance towards sales in GM and Ford bonds explains a significant portion of this co-movement. These results linking liquidity risk and correlation risk are consistent with models in which market prices are episodically determined by the limited risk-bearing capacity of financial intermediaries.

The aim of this study is to investigate the dynamic of price discovery for cross-listed stocks using high-frequency intraday data. We show that the local market leads price discovery process with a significant contribution of the foreign US market. Moreover, we find that arbitrage opportunities enhance market liquidity of cross-listed firms, and vice versa. A higher US market contribution to price discovery provides an increase in the local trading volume as well as in arbitrage opportunities frequency. This latter leads to greater local market contribution to price discovery confirming the information-based transactions in the domestic markets of US cross-listed firms.

In this paper, we study an optimal execution problem in the case of uncertainty in market impact to derive a more realistic market model. Our model is a generalized version of that in [6], where a model of optimal execution with deterministic market impact was formulated. First, we construct a discrete-time model as a value function of an optimal execution problem. We express the market impact function as a product of a deterministic part (an increasing function with respect to the trader's execution volume) and a noise part (a positive random variable). Then, we derive a continuous-time model as a limit of a discrete-time value function. We find that the continuous-time value function is characterized by an optimal control problem with a Lévy process and investigate some of its properties, which are mathematical generalizations of the results in [6]. We also consider a typical example of the execution problem for a risk-neutral trader under log-linear/quadratic market impact with Gamma-distributed noise.