We examine the selection and performance of stocks recommended by analysts at a large investment firm relative to those of sell-side analysts during the period mid-1997 and 2004. The buy-side firm’s analysts issued less optimistic recommendations for stocks with larger market capitalizations and lower return volatility than their sell-side peers, consistent with their facing fewer conflicts of ...

Asset allocation is widely recognized as the most fundamental decision in the investment process. Surprisingly little work has been done on examining what drives the asset allocation recommendations of professional investment advisors. To address this issue, we propose a general framework to identify and estimate the parameters characterizing the preferences and beliefs of money managers. In a ...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. We study herd behavior in a laboratory financial market with ...

Using a new hand-collected data set, this study examines the stock price manipulation in the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE). We examine the characteristics of the manipulated stocks, and their impacts on market quality. The results show that manipulated stocks tend to be small. The stock prices rise throughout the manipulation period, followed by a price reversal. The average cumulative abnormal r...

This study explores the role of investor sentiment in the pricing of a broad set of macro-related risk factors. Economic theory suggests that pervasive factors (such as TFP and consumption growth) should be priced in the cross-section of stock returns. However, when we form portfolios based directly on their exposure to macro factors, we find that portfolios with higher risk exposure do not ear...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the change in quality of the information environment preand postEnron. We test whether the reputations of all auditors declined as a result of Enron. The impact on the market risk premium is also examined. An information processing model is developed to show that a structural break in information quality can produce a variety of outcomes for the repon...

Group A rotaviruses are important causative agents of severe, acute dehydrating diarrhea in foals. A total of 86 rotavirus-positive fecal samples, collected from diarrheic foals from 11 counties in three of the four provinces of Ireland, were obtained from the Irish Equine Centre in Kildare during a 7-year (1999 to 2005) passive surveillance study and were characterized molecularly to establish...

We ask whether a firm’s choice of IPO price is informative in the sense that it relates systematically to the firm’s other choices and characteristics. We find that both institutional ownership and underwriter reputation increases monotonically with the chosen IPO price level. We also find that the relationship between IPO price and underpricing is U-shaped. In contrast, post-IPO turnover displ...

This paper examines the stock return performance of the IPO stocks which are listed on the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) in Hong Kong. By using several benchmarks, over three years, this paper finds that the results produced are sensitive to the benchmark employed. The two factors causing the underperformance of GEM stocks are the ‘technology boom’ and ‘IPO effects’. This suggests that appropr...

Article history: Received 6 March 2012 Received in revised form 30 May 2013 Accepted 4 June 2013 Available online 11 June 2013 We suggest that the limited access to the public debt market is a reason for the violations of pecking order behavior documented in literature. We show that as information asymmetry increases, two effects take place. On the one hand, firms do desire to increase the debt...