Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

The equity cash flow approach to valuing an equity interest is intuitive, rigorous, and practical, and is easily implemented using historical and forecasted statements of cash flows. This method is compared with popular alternatives. The equity cash flow equation for valuing equity is derived taking into account employee compensation expense in the form of equity participation (stock options and stock grants). This is of particular interest in light of the importance of options and grants as a form of compensation.

We examine the international variations in portfolio diversification benefits from an angle of global wealth management. We directly model the impact of widely observed phenomenon, home bias and no short-sales, on international investments with the aim to establish feasible diversification strategies and to identify which countries and/or regions are target markets for wealth management. Our results indicate that investors in less developed countries, particularly in East Asia and South Asia, reap greater benefits from international diversification than investors in the rest of the world. These benefits are particularly noticeable in volatility reduction. Our results reveal important insights for global wealth management.

According to the Jarrow–Turnbull model, coupon bonds are valuated as a portfolio of zero-coupon bonds that, in the event of insolvency, pay a recovery rate at the end of their term. However, when it comes to valuations, the German insolvency law differs in certain respects. To find out whether a model adapted to the German insolvency law will prove to be more empirically robust, an empirical study of 103 corporate bonds was carried out over more than 800 trading days.

This study examines the interaction of corporate profitability, working capital management and firm characteristics. Advanced quantitative techniques, such as dynamic panel estimation and median regression, are used to test the underlying relations. The findings indicate that both size and debt ratio are important determinants of corporate profitability and that profitable firms and losing firms tend to have different determinants of profitability. Several findings indicate that the effects of the components of working capital on profitability depend on firm characteristics such as the state of working capital (surplus/deficit) and where the firm lies in the profitability league.

This study investigates the underpricing of 135 infrastructure IPOs in China from 1996 to 2012. It follows infrastructure IPO studies in Australia and India which report average underpricing returns to subscribers of 3.5% and 25.4%, respectively. The average underpricing return for Chinese infrastructure IPOs is substantially higher at 86.3%, but interestingly substantially lower than the underpricing of Chinese IPOs generally. The issue size, government ownership and the pre-IPO earnings per share are helpful in explaining the underpricing of Chinese infrastructure IPOs while the underwriter reputation does not appear to have much explanatory power. In addition, we find the underpricing of infrastructure IPOs in China is also affected by its local GDP levels.

This paper presents empirical evidence on the effects of environmental regulation announcements on corporate performance in China when performance is proxied by stock returns. While some results indicate the effectiveness of environmental regulation, others point to the opposite. The perverse results are explained in terms of the lack of enforcement of environmental regulation, which is attributed to legislative shortcomings, poorly designed policy instruments, an unsupportive work environment for environmental regulators, a pro-growth political and social environment, and a cultural predisposition to harmony and consensus-building among those involved in the process.

A series of stock prices typically shows a large trend and smaller fluctuations. These two parts are often studied together, as if parts of a single process; but they appear to be separately caused. In this paper, the two parts are analyzed separately, so that one does not distort the other, and some spurious interaction terms are avoided. This contributes a model, in which a wide range of features of stock price behavior are identified. With logarithms of stock prices, the two parts become of more comparable size. This is found to lead to a simpler additive model. On a logarithmic scale, the stock prices show the trend as a straight line (which can be extrapolated), with added fluctuations filling a narrow band. The trend and fluctuations are thus separated. The trend appears to be largely generated by a positive feedback process, describing investor behavior. The width of the fluctuation band does not grow with time, so positive feedback is not its cause. The movement of stock prices can be understood by analyzing the trend and fluctuations as separate processes; the latter considered as a stationary stochastic process with a scale factor. This analysis is applied to a historical dataset $(S\&P500$ index of daily prices from February 1928). Here, the fluctuations are autocorrelated over short time intervals; there is little structure, except for market crash periods, when variability increases. The slope of the trend showed some jumps, not predictable from price history. This approach to modeling describes many aspects of stock price behavior, which are usually discussed in behavioral finance.