Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

The cross-sectional technique of extreme bounds analysis (EBA) is used to identify the determinants of capital structure in a sample of Indonesian shareholding companies. Additional results are presented based on variable deletion and nonnested model selection tests. The results of traditional EBA show that the only robust variable is liquidity, but the results of restricted EBA add three more robust variables: profitability, tangibility, and income variability. However, variable deletion and nonnested model selection tests lend support only to size and liquidity. The conclusion is that most of the variables that appear important in studies of capital structure may not be important at all. From a policy perspective, the finding that some firm-specific factors are relevant to corporate capital structure confirms that financial reform has eliminated the distortions of corporate financial policies and financial markets caused by the previously dominant role of state banks.

In face of broad adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is considering its quality and acceptability. This paper reports a study that examines changes in value relevance with a sample of Peru firms mandated to use international accounting standards between 1999 and 2007. The period under study is broken into a period of International Accounting Standards (IAS) between 1999 and 2001, a period of early IFRS between 2002 and 2004, and a more recent period of IFRS between 2005 and 2007 by major changes to accounting standards. The empirical results generally indicate that value relevance improved from the IAS period to the early IFRS period when the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) took over the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), but worsened from the early IFRS period to the recent IFRS period when more accounting standards started to reflect IASB's preference for fair value measurement of assets and liabilities. Quality weakens to a greater extent for firms with more discretion for fair value estimates. Further analysis shows that such changes are less likely to result from changes in economic conditions, but from the changes of the standards. The findings are particularly alarming in face of rising IFRS adoptions and call for quality improvement to IFRS.

Recent management literature shows that demographic characteristics of top management and corporate performance are related. Bamber et al. (2010) conclude that managers' voluntary disclosure styles are related to demographic characteristics. Also, Francis et al. (2008) demonstrate a negative relation between CEO reputation and earnings quality. We conjecture that, management demography affects auditor choice and earnings quality. Using a sample of 3,881 firm-year observations between 2001 and 2005 in China and controlling for board governance characteristics, we find that a chairperson with better reputation (i.e., holding titles) prefers well-known auditors on the national basis, regional basis and in the industry group. Furthermore, chairpersons with titles and longer tenure report earnings of higher quality. Our results are robust using different measures of auditor choice and earnings quality.

Post-mortems of the financial crisis typically mention "black swans" as the rare events that were the Achilles heel of financial models, manifesting themselves as "25 standard deviation events occurring several days in a row". Here, we briefly discuss the implications of "black swan" events in asset pricing and risk management. We then show that the "black swans" problem virtually disappears for S&P Index returns when surprises are measured relative to the standard deviation of the conditional S&P distribution. In our illustration, we use the one-day-lagged VIX as an easy-to-understand measure of that conditional S&P standard deviation.

This paper examines the quality of financial reporting of Chinese firms cross-listed in the United States, Hong Kong and noncross-listed Chinese firms. We examine quality of financial reporting based on measures of earnings management, timely loss recognition and price-earnings association. We find that both cross-listings and noncross-listings show significant earnings smoothing and use accruals to manage earnings, and are not timely in loss recognition. We surmise that cross-listing in the United States or Hong Kong has not changed the accounting choices of Chinese cross-listing firms. However, our findings show that the market considers earnings and book value data of cross-listing firms to be more informative than those of noncross-listing firms in the event of good news. Our contribution is to show that in contrast to previous literature, firms from China do not have better reporting quality when they cross-list in the United States. There are still significant accounting deficiencies in many Chinese firms cross-listed in the United States (Financial Times, 2011).

Previous studies have documented the informational role of order imbalances in price discovery of the Treasury market. In this paper, we explore the liquidity dimension of order imbalances. Through our research, we find evidence which indicates that order imbalances affect Treasury market liquidity. More importantly, order imbalances have significant effects on Treasury market returns and volatility, consistent with the contention that order imbalances can cause an inventory problem of marketwide concern. Results suggest that a significant portion of the effect of order imbalances on price and quoted spread is associated with the inventory premium that compensates market participants for providing liquidity to uninformed traders. The effects of order imbalances on market liquidity, returns and volatility are stronger for two- and five-year notes and Treasury bills. Furthermore, there is commonality in order imbalances. Sensitivity of order imbalances individual bonds to marketwide order imbalances varies across securities.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how investors perceive and respond to a firm's R&D announcement. We propose that board structure and intra-industry competition jointly dictate the announcement return. In addition, we assume that investors prefer carefully scrutinized R&D investments to mitigate asymmetric-information risks. Finally, we assume that investors prefer a sustainable R&D investment to prevent intense intra-industry competition and to ensure profit potential.

We use a sample of 229 announcements made by 116 Taiwanese listed firms to verify our postulation. Our postulation is the abnormal returns are positively correlated with board independence while negatively correlated with board size. We construct two variables to capture intra-industry competition: (i) the number of days that have elapsed since a competitor's prior announcement and (ii) the ordinal number of announcements in the same industry. Our results show that the announcement effect is negatively correlated with industry R&D intensity. The negative effect is partially ameliorated when the lapse since a prior competitor's announcement is long. Moreover, the announcement effect is also lower when the announcing firm has a high-level of R&D intensity and has experienced numerous prior R&D announcements in the same industry.