Narrow Results

Understanding the impacts of transparency in capital markets is important for determining the trading mechanism and for evaluating market efficiency and market fairness. The recent reforms covering trade transparency on the Taiwan Stock Exchange give us an opportunity to address and examine the relevant arguments. Evidence from this study indicates that increasing trade transparency may create a more efficient market due to decreased effective spreads compared with before the event. Asymmetric information also declines after transparency is liberalized. However, the movement direction of the realized spread does not seem obvious or pronounced. The implication from our results is that the exact effects from trade transparency may be dependent on the stock market's structure itself.

Corporate governance (CG) reformists typically presume better-governed companies are more transparent to investors. We focus on CG and transparency in Japan, where CG has been an ongoing issue. Using local ratings of Japanese companies’ CG and data on corporate disclosures and their associated stock returns, we do find better-governed Japanese companies have made more frequent and timelier disclosures, and their share prices have reflected value-relevant information earlier. While these results hold for good news, they do not hold for bad. Consequently, governance guidance in Japan may not have resulted in both timelier and more balanced release of newsworthy information.

We examine the impact of iceberg orders on the price and order flow dynamics in limit order books. Iceberg orders allow traders to simultaneously hide a large portion of their order size and signal their interest in trading to the market. We show that when market participants detect iceberg orders they tend to strongly respond by submitting matching market orders consistent with iceberg orders facilitating the search for latent liquidity. The greater the fraction of an iceberg order that is executed, the smaller is its price impact consistent with liquidity rather than informed trading. The presence of iceberg orders is associated with increased trading consistent with a positive liquidity externality, but the reduced order book transparency associated with iceberg orders also creates an adverse selection cost for limit orders that may partly offset any gains.

How does the sovereign credit ratings history provided by independent ratings agencies affect domestic financial sector development and international capital inflows to emerging countries? We address this question utilizing a comprehensive dataset of sovereign credit ratings from Standard and Poor’s from 1995–2003 for a cross-section of 51 emerging markets. Within a panel data estimation framework, we examine financial sector development and the influence of sovereign credit ratings provision, controlling for various economic and corporate governance factors identified in the financial development literature. We find strong evidence that our sovereign credit rating measures do affect financial intermediary sector developments and capital flows. We find that: (i) long-term foreign currency sovereign credit ratings are important for encouraging financial intermediary development and for attracting capital flows; (ii) Long-term local currency ratings stimulate domestic market growth but discourage international capital flows; (iii) Short-term ratings (both foreign and local currency denominated) retard all forms of financial developments and capital flows. There are important implications in this research for policy makers to encourage the provision of longer-term credit ratings to promote financial development in emerging economies.