Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

This study examines substitution or complementarity relationships between discretionary loan loss provisions (LLP) and dividend signals. The statistical tests and results presented in this study indicate that bank managers may signal simultaneously with an accounting policy (i.e., discretionary LLP) and a financial policy (i.e., dividend change). This finding primarily points out the possibility that a bank manager with an incentive to mitigate asymmetric information can select multiple signals to maximize signaling effects. Thus, LLP signaling is a complementary (rather than a substitute) signaling device of dividend signaling.

This paper examines how the introduction of the extended opening session of the futures market affects stock price behavior around the market opening. On January 1, 2001, the Taiwan Futures Exchange (TAIFEX) extended the trading hours by opening earlier 15 minutes than the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE). This change presents an opportunity to analyze how the extended opening session of futures market affects stock price behavior. Compared with the pre-extension period, the empirical results show that stock returns are less volatile and return autocorrelations are less positively correlated around the stock market opening. Moreover, overreaction for opening prices of the stock market is mitigated in the post-extension period. Finally, unexpected futures returns during the extended opening session can predict overnight stock returns. Overall, the empirical results are consistent with Foster and Viswanathan (1990) in that informed traders will trade aggressively at the market opening.

This study investigates the usefulness of auditors' opinions, market factors, macroeconomic factors, and industry factors in predicting financial distress of Taiwanese firms. Specifically, two non-traditional auditors' opinions are evaluated: "long-term investment audited by other auditors" ("other auditor"), and "realized investment income based on non-audited financial statements" ("no auditor").

The results of the 22 discrete-time hazard models show that "other auditor" opinions have incremental contribution in predicting financial distress, in addition to "going concern" opinions. This suggests that "other auditor" opinions possess higher risk of overstating earnings and firms with such income items are more likely to fail. Besides, we find that the macroeconomic factors studied significantly explain financial distress. Particularly, the survivals of electronic firms are more sensitive to earnings due to higher earnings fluctuations in such firms. Finally, models with auditors' opinions, market factors, macroeconomic factors, and industry factors perform better than the financial ratio-only model in financial distress prediction.

While most papers in finance literature investigate how the stock market reacts to announcements of corporate events, very few study the opposite, how namely, the manager responds to the information from outside investors. In this paper, we examine this issue, using open market share repurchases. Open market share repurchase offers flexibility for the manager to decide whether or not to buy back shares. Therefore, the manager may refer to the opinions of outside investors and make the decision, based on actual buyback activities. We propose learning, over-confidence and timing hypotheses to interpret the behavior of the managerial response to initial market reaction on the share repurchase announcement. Empirically, if a repurchase announcement abnormal return is low, then the manager tends to achieve the repurchase announced ratio by purchasing more shares. In addition, the investor will positively react to this repurchase in the long run. These empirical findings are consistent with the market timing hypothesis, which implies that managers know the true value of their firms better than the market at the moment of the share repurchase announcement.

Firms with higher board independence, smaller boards, and lower expected managerial entrenchment, have lower cash holdings. We find that the positive association between cash holdings and managerial entrenchment is mitigated by stronger board structures. Specifically, in firms with higher expected managerial entrenchment, those with higher proportion of outside director on the board and smaller board size have lower cash holdings. We also find that firm value is negatively associated with cash levels. The negative association between firm value and cash holdings is more pronounced in firms with (i) lower proportion of outside directors, (ii) larger boards and (iii) higher expected managerial entrenchment. For firms with both high cash holdings and high expected managerial entrenchment, investors additionally discount the valuation of firms with lower proportion of outside directors and those with larger boards.

On the basis of SVAR models of monetary policy in Egypt for the period December 1976–May 2006, our paper explores a new empirical assessment for the interest rate channel in correcting trouble in the Egyptian economy by imposing contemporaneous and long run restrictions. It appears that after a monetary policy expansion, output is stable in the first period, rises temporarily reaching the baseline at t = 40, and the global monetary aggregate rises but not significantly. In addition, the price level rises with great difficulties in response to a negative interest rate shock to the global liquidity aggregate. The excess of money supply has a transitory effect on the Egyptian output but it causes inflation pressures.

SVAR Blanchard and Quah (1989) estimation reveals contradictory results to the previous findings. Last but certainly not least, this means that the effect of bank lending and the interest rate channels on the economy are limited in time.

The paper shows that the transmission of monetary policy through the interest rate channel has become weak in the short run but more important in the long run. Nonetheless, the bank lending channel through the commercial bank lending is not a potent monetary transmission mechanism.

Natural disasters are also known as catastrophes with low frequency but high damages. Typhoons and floods are the major catastrophes which lead to gargantuan losses in Asia. Once a disaster occurs, a broad region will be affected and this will result in huge social loss. If issuers or governments use the wrong loss models or risk measure indexes to price the related insurance products, they will get an inaccurate price and thus be insolvent to the claims. Previous researches often use a Log-Normal distribution to model a catastrophic loss. This is not appropriate since the characteristics of a loss distribution have some empirical facts, including the positive skewness and the heavy-tailed properties. Recently, some studies (McNeil and Frey, 2000; Rootzen and Tajvidi, 2000; Thuring et al., 2008) also point out that using Log-Normal distribution to model a characteristic loss is not suitable. Therefore, we build a typhoon and flood loss model with higher order moments and estimate the parameters through a Bayesian Monte Carlo Markov Chain method. According to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, we find that the Pareto distribution is more adaptive for modeling the loss of typhoon and flood. Further, we evaluate different kinds of risk measure indexes through simulating and numerical analysis. It gives the beacon to issuers or governments when they want to issue the insurance products about typhoon and flood loss.

We use pre-offer market valuations to examine the motives for takeovers under the misvaluation theory. According to previous literature, the motives for merger and acquisition consist of synergy, agency and hubris. We find that overvalued acquirers paying by cash have the motives of synergy and hubris. However, overvalued acquirers paying by stock have the motives of agency and hubris. On the other hand, the motive of undervalued acquirers paying by cash is only hubris. Lastly, the motives of those undervalued acquirers paying by stock are synergy and hubris. In this study, we provide the empirical evidence to show that acquirers' stock misevaluation and their payment methods will differentiate the motives for takeovers.