Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

This article examines fractional processes as alternatives to random walks in emerging foreign exchange rate markets. Sowell's (1992) joint maximum likelihood is used to estimate the ARFIMA parameters and test for random walks. The results show that, in most cases, the emerging market exchange rates follow fractionally integrated processes. Forecasts of exchange rates based on the fractionally integrated autoregressive moving average models are compared to those from the benchmark random walk models. A Harvey, Leybourne and Newbold (1997) test of equality of forecast performance indicates that the ARFIMA forecasts are more efficient in the multi-step-ahead forecasts than the random walk model forecasts. The presence of fractional integration is seen to be associated with market inefficiency in the exchange markets examined. The evidence suggests that fractional integrated processes are viable alternatives to random walks for describing and forecasting exchange rates in the emerging markets.

This study is to address the estimation of financial distress costs including the deterioration in asset value. A sample of 104 TAIEX-listed financially distressed companies was collected covering the period from 1998 to 2004. As expected, it is found that the TAIEX-listed financially distressed companies have registered a huge reduction in stock price. Moreover, as expected, it is found that the financial distress costs of the "delisting" group are largest, the financial distress costs of the "maintaining normal trading" group are lowest, and the financial distress costs of the "cash transaction only/suspended trading" group fall somewhere in between. Based on the empirical findings, the present study concludes that the magnitude of financial distress costs is substantially underreported in the literature as a result of ignoring deterioration in asset value.

The human resources are the most important input for the enterprise, so the management of talents is necessary. Especially under level-management philosophy, the agency problem between owners and professional managers often influence the pursuit of enterprise's value maximization. Therefore, an effective rewarding system can make the agent bear some performance responsibility, and can lighten the idle duty problem. Based on this argument, first, this research examines the implementation of a reward plan with employees' bonus and employees' warrant, and whether it can improve the enterprises' performances and shareholder's value. Second, this research uses the Mishkin test (1983) to analyze whether the investors have rational pricing to employees' reward system.

In this paper, we revisit the day-of-the-week effect by examining the Taiwan stock market. Based on the daily data from 1991 to 2008, our results show that the Taiwan stock market exhibits a strong day-of-the-week effect. In particular, the return on Tuesday is negative and significant from 1991 to 1997, and the returns on the weekend are positive and significant from 1991 to 1997 and from 2001 to 2008. In agreement with other studies, our results also show that the Tuesday's effect is weaker in recent years. In an attempt to explain the day-of-the-week effect, we demonstrate that short sales do not seem to play a significant role, which is contrary to the findings of Chen and Singal (2003) who study the US stock market. However, stock liquidity (measured by turnover ratio) seems to be related to the day-of-the-week effect in the Taiwan stock market.

In this study, we examine the effect of firm-level governance on the firm's choice of an external auditor. Further, we test how the relation between corporate governance and auditor choice may be affected by the strength of legal environment. The results show that firm-level governance scores are positively related to the firm's auditor choice. This association is strengthened by country-level legal protection. Specifically, the positive association between auditor choice and the firm-level governance scores is weaker (stronger) in a low (high) legal environment. These findings are robust after controlling for determinants that were found to be significant in earlier research. Overall, our results suggest that the benefits arising from the employment of high-quality auditors are likely to be greater when legal environment is stronger because both auditors and firms are subject to more severe legal punishments for opportunistic behavior.

Simultaneous volatility models are developed and shown to be separate from multivariate GARCH estimators. An example is provided that allows for simultaneous and unidirectional volatility and volume of trade effects. These effects are tested using intraday data from the Australian cash index and index futures markets. Overnight volatility spillover effects from the United States S&P500 index futures markets are tested using alternative estimates of this US market volatility. The simultaneous volatility model proves to be robust to alternative specifications of returns equations and to misspecification of the direction of volatility causality.

This study sets out with the aim of determining whether there is such a thing as an optimal level of research and development (R&D) intensity within which a firm can effectively maximize its sales growth ratio. We adopt an advanced panel threshold regression model to examine the relationship between R&D intensity and the growth rate in sales based upon data on firms within the electronics industry in Taiwan. The results demonstrate that R&D intensity has a positive impact on sales growth when the level of such R&D intensity is below the threshold value, and a negative impact when the level of R&D intensity is above the threshold value.