This paper shows that firms from financial centres are more likely to go public than their provincial counterparts. The financial centre bias is analysed for 32 countries, including the European Union, the USA and Japan. It is particularly strong in countries with underdeveloped stock markets and closed corporate governance regimes, but it is still present in countries with the most developed s...

This paper investigates the low risk anomaly, which suggests that less risky stocks outperform riskier ones. Focusing on European stock market, present study examines influence of coskewness, a measure asymmetry in returns with respect to market return. Stocks are sorted into 2x5 quintile portfolios based coskewness and beta volatility. Regression analysis using Fama-French three five factor mo...

We examine whether rational investor responses to information uncertainty (IU) explain properties of and returns to several financial anomalies (post-earnings announcement drift, value-glamour, and accruals anomalies). Consistent with a rational learning explanation, we find that: (1) higher IU signals have more muted initial market reactions; (2) extreme anomaly portfolios are characterized by...

Due to the overwhelming international evidence that stock prices drop by less than the dividend paid on ex-dividend days, the ex-dividend day anomaly is considered a stylized fact. Two main approaches have emerged to explain this empirical regularity: the tax-clientele hypothesis and the microstructure of financial markets. Although the most widely accepted explanation for this fact relies on t...

The market fails to incorporate the adverse information conveyed by the going-concern (GC) opinion in a timely manner. This paper seeks to explain this market-pricing paradox. In particular, we argue that the lottery-like features of GC stocks attract a predominantly retail clientele who use such stocks to gamble in the market. Such trading behavior leads to underreaction to the GC event itself...

The accruals anomaly—the negative relationship between accounting accruals and subsequent stock returns—has been well documented in the academic and practitioner literatures for almost a decade. To the extent that this anomaly represents market inefficiency, one would expect sophisticated investors to learn about it and arbitrage the anomaly away. Yet, we show that the accruals anomaly still pe...

Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006a) show that stocks with high idiosyncratic return volatility tend to have low future returns. This paper further documents that idiosyncratic volatility is inversely related to future earning shocks, and more importantly, that the returnpredictive power of idiosyncratic volatility is induced by its information content about future earnings. We examine various...

This paper shows that information effects per se are not responsible for the Gi®en goods anomaly affecting competitive traders’ demands in multi-asset, noisy rational expectations equilibrium models. The role that information plays in traders’ strategies also matters. In a market with risk averse, uninformed traders, informed agents have a dual motive for trading: speculation and market making....

We provide novel evidence on which theories best explain stock return anomalies by decomposing anomaly portfolio returns into components driven by the underlying …rms’cash ‡ows or their discount rates. For each of …ve well-known anomalies, we …nd that cash ‡ow shocks explain more variation in anomaly portfolio returns than discount rate shocks. The cash ‡ow and discount rate components of each ...