an investigation of market microstructure impacts on event study returns we investigate the importance of bid ask spread induced biases on event date returns as exemplified by seasoned equity offerings by nyse listed firms we document significant negative return biases on the offering day which explain a large portion of the negative event date return documented in the literature buy sell order flow imbalance is prominent around the offering and induces a relatively large spread bias if order imbalances are suspected the researcher can use returns calculated from the midpoint of the closing bid and ask quotes instead of returns calculated from closing transaction prices to avoid this return bias several studies document the impact of bid ask spreads on security return patterns which appear inconsistent with the informational efficiency of capital markets phillips and smith 1980 find spread induced bias to be important in explaining apparent arbitrage opportunities in the option markets lakonishok and smidt 1984 uncover evidence suggesting a relation between bid ask spreads and turn of the year seasonality in stock returns 1 keim 1989 and porter 1989 further document the empirical importance of

information exchange in policy networks information exchange in policy networks is usually attributed to preference similarity influence reputation social trust and institutional actor roles we suggest that political opportunity structures and transaction costs play another crucial role and estimate a rich statistical network model on tie formation in the german toxic chemicals policy domain the results indicate that the effect of preference similarity is absorbed by institutional relational and social opportunity structures political actors choose contacts who minimize transaction costs while maximizing outreach and information we also find that different types of information exchange operate in complementary but not necessarily congruent ways

day of the week effects and asset returns the number of empirical studies using daily stock returns is rapidly increasing researchers generally assume that the distribution of stock returns is identical for all days of the week a convenient statistical assumption but not a necessary condition of market equilibrium nevertheless there are reasons to suspect that the distribution of returns may vary according to the day of the week the most obvious is the impact of weekends on monday s return since monday s return is calculated over three instead of one calender day the mean and variance may well be higher on monday compared with any other daily return perhaps three times as large previous research has examined the daily distribution of stock returns for a monday effect while fama 1965 does not compare daily mean returns he does report that monday s variance is about 20o greater than other daily returns with a traditional distributional assumption regarding the returns on a financial asset specifies that the expected returns are identical for all days of the week contrary to this plausible assumption this paper discovers that the expected returns on common stocks and treasury bills are not constant across days of the week the most notable evidence is for monday s returns where the mean is unusually low or even negative several explanations of the results are investigated but none proves satisfactory aside from documenting significant day of the week effects the implications of the results for tests of market efficiency are examined while market adjusted returns continue to exhibit day of the week effects these effects are no longer concentrated on monday during the last year we have had many conversations with our colleagues throughout the professions we are particularly thankful to the participants at sessions of the western and american finance associations where preliminary versions of this paper were presented special thanks are due to gene fama gailen hite jon ingersoll robert jarrow merton miller clifford smith and rex thompson the expert research assistance of frank rabinovitch and youngsup yun is gratefully acknowledged 1 the list of papers using daily stock returns is too long to name recent examples include charest 1978 dodd 1980 banz 1981 and reinganum 1981

the sensitivity of vpin to the choice of trade classification algorithm abstract the vpin metric easley et al 2012b aims to detect and predict the toxicity of order flow this paper examines the sensitivity and robustness of vpin to the choice of trade classification scheme which is the major input used to compute vpin we compare deterministic trade by trade classification approaches with results computed using a newly proposed heuristic approach bulk volume classification we find substantial differences for all levels of aggregation trade classification order imbalance vpin and identifying toxic periods we also find that the detection of toxic periods does not yield consistent results in more than 60 of cases but regression analysis can identify volume and return volatility as parameters that contribute to higher levels of sensitivity

market behavior in the presence of costly imperfect information experimental evidence abstract we investigate the effects of imperfect private information on prices in an experimental asset market we compare bayesian predictions with market prices examine information dissemination and consider the value of imperfect information we find some evidence that market prices are consistent with bayes rule we also find that non bayesian prices are more likely to arise as the degree of uncertainty associated with private information increases imperfect information is disseminated in our experimental markets and traders perceive that imperfect information has value

a day end transaction price anomaly a large mean price change is observed on the last daily nyse transaction this suggests that closing prices may not consistently represent stock values transaction prices are studied to further characterize the day end price rise and to determine whether it is due to any limited subsample of stocks or dates the results indicate that the phenomenon is pervasive over most firms and days some evidence suggests that it is caused by a change in the frequency of ask prices at day end

state lottery adoptions as policy innovations an event history analysis two types of explanations of state government innovation have been proposed internal determinants models which posit that the factors causing a state government to innovate are political economic and social characteristics of a state and regional diffusion models which point toward the role of policy adoptions by neighboring states in prompting a state to adopt we show that the two are conceptually compatible relying on mohr s theory of organizational innovation then we develop and test a unified explanation of state lottery adoptions reflecting both internal and regional influences the empirical results provide a great degree of support for mohr s theory for the empirical analysis we rely on event history analysis a form of pooled cross sectional time series analysis which we believe may be useful in a wide variety of subfields of political science event history analysis may be able to explain important forms of political behavior by individuals organizations or governments even if they occur only rarely

holiday trading in futures markets in this paper we find significantly higher preholiday returns in futures contracts compared to nonholiday returns the findings are consistent with the inventory adjustment hypothesis since higher preholiday returns associated with lower trading volume are most pronounced for exchange closed holidays there is evidence of positive postholiday returns associated with higher trading volume for exchangeopen holidays this is consistent with positive holiday sentiments the holiday effect is uniquely independent the magnitude of excess holiday returns is the largest among all seasonal variations in recent years a growing body of literature suggests the presence of abnormal returns for exchange holidays in the equity markets in particular ariel 1990 and lakonishok and smidt 1988 find that stock market returns for the days prior to holidays are significantly higher than returns for other days pettengill 1989 shows that while preholiday and other days returns differ significantly preholiday returns vary by holiday firm size and day of the week on which the holiday falls various theories have been proposed to explain the type of return generating process surrounding holidays since holidays are often considered another form of market closing similar to weekends it seems reasonable that an explanation for one might help explain the other 2 for example if the weekend effect could be explained by settlement procedures then this argument is relevant because holidays can delay settlement for up to two days and could have an effect on returns up to a week prior to the holiday accordingly lakonishok and levi 1982 postulate that friday and perhaps tuesday holidays would generate high thursday and monday returns the holiday effect has also been considered a result of the inventory adjustment process since the loss potential of a short position is more than that of a long position traders may be reluctant to take short positions prior to a nontrading period this would suggest a lesser selling

statistical properties of the roll serial covariance bid ask spread estimator exact small sample population moments of the standard serial covariance and variance estimators are derived under the assumptions of the roll bid ask spread model noise explains why serial covariance estimates are often positive in annual samples of daily and weekly returns small sample estimator bias partially explains why weekly estimates are more negative than daily estimates noise causes the roll spread estimator to be severely biased by jensen s inequality the french roll adjusted variance estimator is unbiased but noisy empirical tests confirm the major implications

making meaningful commitments accounting for variation in cities investments of staff and fiscal resources to sustainability environmental sustainability is one of the great challenges of the 21st century a number of explanations have been advanced for why some local governments make strong commitments to sustainability while others do not most of the extant empirical research however has relied on models that employ only one or just a few of these explanations as a result empirical analyses do not encompass a comprehensive set of variables that account for alternative explanations this study begins to fill this lacuna by specifying an empirical model that examines six explanations for local commitment towards sustainability local sustainability priorities regional governance climate protection networks interest group support local fiscal capacity and characteristics of the local governing institution moreover we use the designation of human and financial resources specifically for sustainability to operationalise commitment this is a more substantive measure than has been used in previous studies we accomplish

stock price clustering and discreteness stock prices cluster on round fractions clustering increases with price level and volatility and decreases with capitalization and transaction frequency clustering is pervasive price clustering will occur if traders use discrete price sets to simplify their negotiations exchange regulations require that most stocks be traded on eighths clustering on larger fractions will occur if traders choose to use discrete price sets based on quarters halves or whole numbers an econometric model of clustering is derived and estimated projections from the results suggest that traders would frequently use odd sixteenths when trading low price stocks if exchange regulations permitted trading on sixteenths article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the conditional effect of specialized governance on public policy what are the policy consequences of creating functionally specialized venues for decision making this study directly compares special districts with general purpose local governments to evaluate how specialization influences responsiveness and policy choice previous theorizing has assumed that specialization should have the same effect across all policy contexts the findings presented here show instead that its effect is conditional on the status of public problems objective conditions related to a policy issue more strongly influence the responsiveness of multipurpose legislatures than that of special districts thus the institutional effect of functional specialization varies with the severity of the public problem the result is that governing structure matters most where problems are least severe the findings demonstrate the importance of considering policy context when analyzing the effects of political institutions

local institutions and the politics of urban growth this article uses a political market framework to analyze how the structure of local political institutions affects the relative political influence of development and environmental interests in the context of urban growth using panel data from 406 florida cities from 1998 to 2003 the empirical analysis finds important interaction effects between the structure of city executive branch institutions and interest group variables the economic and political forces driving urban growth do not operate identically in all cities they vary as a function of institutional context institutional structure helps determine which interest groups have their preferences reflected in local land use changes and development patterns the resulting patterns suggest a sustainability paradox wherein richer environmental interests push for the preservation of environmental amenities while at the same time accelerating the number of residential units built in a community

penny wise dollar foolish buy sell imbalances on and around round numbers this paper provides evidence that stock traders focus on round numbers as cognitive reference points for value using a random sample of more than 100 million stock transactions we find excess buying selling by liquidity demanders at all price points one penny below above round numbers further the size of the buy sell imbalance is monotonic in the roundness of the adjacent round number i e largest adjacent to integers second largest adjacent to half dollars etc conditioning on the price path we find much stronger excess buying selling by liquidity demanders when the ask falls bid rises to reach the integer than when it crosses the integer we discuss and test three explanations for these results finally 24 hour returns also vary by price point and buy sell imbalances are a major determinant of that variation across price points buying selling by liquidity demanders below above round numbers yield losses approaching 1 billion per year this paper was accepted by brad barber teck ho and terrance odean special issue editors

behaviour of intra daily stock return on an asian emerging market hong kong this study examines the intra daily return behaviour of one of the most open asian emerging markets hong kong it is found that there is a general increase in the positive skewness and kurtosis of all the intra daily returns after the 1987 october crash and the distributions of all the returns have become non normal after the crash there seems to be more day of the week and time of the day variations in the post crash period than in the pre crash period there also exists some day end effect in both of the periods and such a day end effect seems to be related to the day of the week

information disclosure and price manipulation during the pre closing session evidence from an order driven market on 20 february 2012 the taiwan stock exchange corporation launched an order matching simulation mechanism for five minutes during the start of the pre closing session in order to increase information disclosure during this period 13 25 13 30 pre closing information disclosure significantly reduces both trading costs and closing price volatility as well as price manipulation the decrease in price manipulation found in this work is due to pre closing information disclosure not the behaviour of investors shifting to an earlier time further if a stock price rises or falls by more than 3 5 in the simulation in the last minute during the closing session trading of the stock will be suspended for two minutes from 13 31 to reduce volatility however this trading mechanism suspended closing does not seem to have achieved the intended goals of the authorities as it has not been able to significantly reduce closing price volatility and price manipulation

market for information experimental evidence predictions of the noisy rational expectations equilibrium ree model are found to be relatively accurate for both asset and information markets in the laboratory when information about an asset s uncertain dividend is sold to a fixed number of highest bidders prices allocations efficiency and distribution of profit predictions of the full revelation ree model in the asset market dominate the predictions of the walrasian model demand for information shifts to the left and its price declines close to zero when the price of information is fixed at a relatively high level the number of informed agents and the informativeness of the asset market tends to adjust to permit the informed agents to recover their investment in information

large block transactions the speed of response and temporary and permanent stock price effects abstract the paper investigates how quickly prices attain new equilibrium levels after large block transactions and measures the associated temporary and permanent price effects we find that prices adjust within at most three trades with most of the adjustment occurring in the first trade the temporary price effect for seller initiated transactions is related to block size but the temporary price effect observed for buyer initiated transactions is no larger than that observed in 100 share trades most of the price effect associated with block trades is permanent and is related to block size regardless of the initiating party

overcoming collective action barriers to energy sustainability a longitudinal study of climate protection accord adoption by local governments abstract high levels of observed city involvement in energy and climate initiatives indicate that free riding has been much less of a barrier to local climate protection efforts than suggested by theories of collective action this study investigates why local governments have adopted various energy and climate change policy instruments despite the non excludability of climate benefits this paper advances theories of institutional collective action ica and policy diffusion by testing ica based hypotheses that local officials are able to overcome collective action problems to the extent that the costs of these initiatives are minimized through policy network interactions the extent to which climate action produces localized benefits or compliments local environmental development or growth management efforts and the extent to which energy and climate protection efforts generate selective benefits to elected and appointed local government officials who advance their career interests depending on the existing configurations of political system institutions analysis of adoptions of the climate protection agreements by florida cities indicates larger cities are more likely to adopt climate agreement while district elections decrease the likelihood of climate policy adoption moreover economic development rather than growth management or environmental problem situation is linked to climate initiatives

cooperation in common property regimes under extreme drought conditions empirical evidence from the use of pooled transferable quotas in spanish irrigation systems the success of a common property regime can be partially judged on the basis of its ability to handle extreme events that stress its capacity for cooperation this paper compares the performance of 38 irrigation associations in a large irrigation area in spain during a severe drought as a test of hypotheses derived from property right theories the case is particularly interesting because it contains a transferable quota institution that can potentially strengthen the effectiveness of common property regimes in scarcity conditions according to the results the use of transferable quotas across associations can contribute to cooperation and drought performance in this context performance is higher when the associations enjoy 1 effective monitoring systems 2 experience and legitimate leaders and 3 facilitative biophysical conditions like soil water holding capacity the analysis also suggests that biophysical properties like soil water holding capacity may compensate for weaker monitoring or leadership and vice versa

watershed partnerships and the emergence of collective action institutions this paper examines the emergence of local cooperative institutions watershed partnerships that resolve collective action problems involved in the management of natural resources the political contracting approach to institutional supply suggests that watershed partnerships are more likely to emerge when potential benefits outweigh the transaction costs of developing and maintaining new institutions we analyze the impact of social political economic and ecological features of watersheds that affect benefits and transaction costs on the emergence of 958 watershed partnerships in the more than 2 100 watersheds in the united states our findings demonstrate that watershed partnerships are most likely to emerge in watersheds confronting severe pollution problems associated with agricultural and urban runoff with low levels of command and control enforcement and containing the resources to offset transaction costs

a characterization of the daily and intraday behavior of returns on options the daily and intraday behavior of returns on chicago board options exchange options is examined option returns contain systematic patterns even after adjusting for patterns in the means and variances of the underlying assets this is consistent with the hypothesis that informed trading in options can make the order flow in the options market informative about the value of the underlying asset making options nonredundant the intraday patterns in adjusted option return variances are further consistent with a model of strategic trading by informed and discretionary liquidity traders this paper examines the daily and intraday behavior of returns on options we have two goals our first objective is to identify systematic patterns in the means and variances of daily and intraday returns on options our second objective is to decompose option returns into patterns that are related to the means and variances of the underlying stocks and by inference those patterns that are independent of patterns in the means and variances of the underlying assets 1 our work is important for a number of reasons first options have become as important as common stocks yet there is no detailed investigation of the behavior of returns on options second it is important to identify similarities and differences in return patterns across different securities and market structures an understanding of these similarities and differences would allow us to develop better models of returns that capture these properties closely related to this it is instructive to examine option returns in light of the partial equilibrium models we use to value them specifically are the return patterns in options driven exclusively by the underlying stocks or do option returns contain patterns of their own identifying independent yet similar patterns in options returns may lead to an identification of factors that are common across two different market structures the new york

market behavior in the presence of divergent and imperfect private information experimental evidence from canada china and the united states abstract we conduct 27 asset markets to examine market behavior when traders have divergent and imperfect information each market consists of well informed wi and less informed li agents nine markets each are conducted in canada china and the us we find that wi agents private information is partially but not fully reflected in prices we also document cross country differences in the degree to which private information is reflected in prices lastly we find that wi agents are able to exploit their informational advantage and outperform li agents this result holds across countries

price drivers and structural breaks in european carbon prices 2005 2007 this article aims at characterizing the daily price fundamentals of european union allowances euas traded since 2005 as part of the emissions trading scheme ets the presence of two structural changes on april 2006 following the disclosure of 2005 verified emissions and on october 2006 following the european commission announcement of stricter phase ii allocation allows to isolate distinct fundamentals evolving overtime the results extend previous literature by showing that eua spot prices react not only to energy prices with forecast errors but also to unanticipated temperatures changes during colder events besides the sub period decomposition of the pilot phase gives a better grasp of institutional and market events that drive allowance price changes

price formation in double auction markets abstract this paper reports 14 laboratory experiments that examine existing theories of the price formation process in the continuous double auction the experiments feature random values and costs and therefore a new price formation observation each period we find that efficiency is high and rises with experience in this environment we also find that trades with greater exchange surplus tend to occur earlier in the period that increased trader experience reduces an anomalous intertemporal arbitrage opportunity observed previously and that only when traders are very experienced does exchange surplus accrue disproportionately to the side of the market with a smaller number of traders

the informational role of stock and option volume this article analyzes the intraday interdependence of order flows and price movements for actively traded nyse stocks and their chicago board options exchange cboe traded options stock net trade volume buyer initiated volume minus seller initiated volume has strong predictive ability for stock and option quote revisions but option net trade volume has no incremental predictive ability this suggests that informed investors initiate trades in the stock market but not in the option market on the other hand both stock and option quote revisions have predictive ability for each other thus while information in the stock market is contained in both quote revisions and trades information in the option market is contained only in quote revisions copyright 2002 oxford university press

regulatory and legal pressures and the costs of nasdaq trading the nasdaq market came under intense pressure from regulators and class action lawsuits following allegations of tacit collusion by christie and schultz 1994 this article examines the changes in transaction costs on the nasdaq from january 1993 through june 1996 using 16 million trades in 30 stocks effective spreads cannot be matched however the autocovariance spread estimator of roll 1984 works well with intraday data over this period this spread estimator reveals that trading costs declined significantly for 29 of the 30 stocks over 1993 96 article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

volume volatility and the dispersion of beliefs i examine a two period noisy rational expectations model of a futures market and show that the dispersion of expectations about a weighted average of future prices measures both the additional volatility and the additional expected volume of trade associated with noisy information the role played by dispersion helps clarify several stylized facts concerning volume and price behavior specifically dispersion can be a factor contributing to the positive correlation between volume and absolute price changes and the positive correlation between consecutive absolute price changes article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

making the commons work conservation and cooperation in ireland commonage represents land held under common property that incorporates a system of local cooperative arrangements and rules to conserve and manage the irish uplands we analyze the institutional and economic factors that influence the behavior of commonage farmers under a common property regime using a recursive bivariate probit model results show that 1 cooperation has a positive and important impact on commonage conservation 2 agricultural policies by way of livestock premia increase the level of degradation while 3 farm financial support through agrienvironment measures positively affects commonage conservation and encourages cooperation between farmers

an investigation of transactions data for nyse stocks using transactions data the behavior of returns and characteristics of trades at the micro level is examined a minute by minute market return series is formed and tested for normality and autocorrelation evidence of differences in return distributions is found among overnight trades trades during the first 30 minutes following the market opening trades at the close and trades during the remainder of the day the latter distribution is found to be normal unusually high returns and standard deviations of returns are found at the beginning and the end of the trading day when the beginningand end of the day effects are omitted autocorrelation in the market return series is reduced substantially a number of patterns in trading are reported this paper empirically investigates the nature of the return generating process and the characteristics of trade size price changes trading frequency and trading interval at the level of individual trades for a large sample of nyse stocks previous studies of market indices have used daily weekly or monthly

carbon price drivers phase i versus phase ii equilibrium abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the carbon price during the two phases of the european union emission trading scheme eu ets more specifically relying on daily eu allowance futures contracts we test whether the carbon price drivers identified for phase i still hold for phase ii and evolve toward a long run relationship using cointegration techniques and accounting for the 2006 structural break in the carbon market we show that while a cointegrating relationship exists for both phases of the eu ets the nature of this equilibrium relationship is different across the two subperiods with an increasing role of fundamentals in phase ii deriving equilibrium values we show that the carbon price tends to be undervalued since the end of 2009

the market microstructure of the european climate exchange abstract this paper analyzes the market microstructure of the european climate exchange the largest eu ets trading venue the ecx captures 2 3 of the screen traded market in eua and more than 90 in cer volume growth has averaged 277 in eua between 2005 and 2009 and 724 in cer since 2007 spreads range from 0 0188 to 0 0406 for eua and 0 0276 to 0 0796 for cer the median proportion of the spread due to adverse selection reaches 76 for eua and 75 for cer realized volatility bid ask spreads and adverse selection costs decline with verified emission releases market impact estimates imply that an average trade will move the eua market by 1 06 euro centimes and the cer market 1 45 the ecx is providing between 75 and 88 of price discovery for eua trading and between 64 and 72 for cer we find imbalances in the order book help predict returns for up to three days a simple trading strategy that enters the market long or short when the order imbalance is strong is profitable even after accounting for spreads and market impact

efficiency of experimental security markets with insider information an application of rational expectations models the study reports on the ability of competing models of market information integration and dissemination to explain the behavior of simple laboratory markets for a one priced security returns to the security depended upon a randomly drawn state of nature some agents insiders whose identity was unknown to other agents knew the state before the markets opened with replication of market conditions the predictions of a fully revealing rational expectations model are relatively accurate prices adjusted immediately to near rational expectations prices profits of insiders were virtually indistinguishable from non insiders and efficiency levels converged to near 100 percent

culture and competition a laboratory market comparison between china and the west abstract twenty laboratory markets 160 subjects were conducted to measure the influences on competitive economic behavior of 1 political and ethnic culture 2 information regarding the profits earned by others and 3 interaction between 1 and 2 the market design maximized the distance between the competitive equilibrium prediction and the equitable division of profits between traders isolated cultural differences were noted in price convergence trends however these isolated trend differences are overshadowed by a close cultural similarity in price levels across market periods the data of this study therefore provide evidence that the competitiveness observed in several prior laboratory market studies persists even in a markedly different culture

scholar participated governance as an alternative solution to the problem of collective action in social ecological systems abstract different from the three classical and popular models of central authority privatization and self governance which have been widely researched and applied in social ecological policymaking in recent years we propose an alternative model for collective action to resolve the problem of the tragedy of the commons our study is based on a series of game theoretic analyses and a field study of combating desertification in seven counties in northwest china the results show that scholars who have comparative advantages in knowledge and information over other social actors such as herders and governments can help game players resolve their collective action dilemma in social ecological systems under certain conditions this positive outcome can be achieved mainly through the participation of scholars as information providers governmental agents scholar entrepreneurs and pure game players

the intraday speed of stock price adjustment to major dividend changes bid ask bounce and order flow imbalances abstract this paper examines the intraday stock price reaction to substantial shifts in dividend policy the results indicate the price reaction to be slower than that previously found by patell and wolfson 1984 and closer to that found with earnings announcements by woodruff and senchack 1988 possible order flow imbalances are examined by looking at the proximity of transaction prices to contemporaneous bid and ask quotes while order flow imbalances are evident for bad news announcements this is not the case for the dividend increase sample this is interpreted as evidence that the price reaction to major dividend increases are in general anticipated fifteen minute holding period returns are computed to measure the movement of equilibrium prices during the announcement period results show a rapid adjustment of prices to positive announcements with adjustment to negative announcements taking up to 75 minutes finally fifteen minute lagged bid ask returns are calculated to determine whether an investor could respond to the announcement and earn positive returns these results are found to be dependent on the transaction cost assumptions being made

j shaped returns to timing advantage in access to information experimental evidence and a tentative explanation abstract the question of how useful information is in financial markets has been discussed for decades and is still unresolved in this paper we challenge the widely held belief that additional information is never a disadvantage we present results from experimental financial markets with asymmetrically informed traders in all treatments we conduct we find a j shaped distribution of returns while the best informed outperform all others average informed traders have significantly lower returns than the least informed this can mainly be attributed to trend reversals in the fundamental information prices in our markets do not reflect ree but rather naive trader equilibrium

information trading and stock returns lessons from dually listed securities this paper compares the intra day patterns on the nyse and amex of volatility trading volume and bid ask spreads for european and japanese dually listed stocks with american stocks of comparable average trading volume and volatility it is shown that the intra day patterns for these stocks are remarkably similar even though public information flows differ markedly across these stocks during the trading day in the early morning all stocks have higher volatility than later in the day but this phenomenon is most pronounced for japanese stocks and affects american stocks the least we argue that these patterns are consistent with markets reacting to the overnight accumulation of public information but are inconsistent with the view that early morning volatility can be attributed to monopolistic specialist behavior

is more information always better experimental financial markets with cumulative information abstract we study the value of information in financial markets by asking whether having more information always leads to higher returns we address this question in an experiment where information about an asset s intrinsic value is cumulatively distributed among traders we find that only the very best informed traders i e insiders significantly outperform less informed traders however there is a wide range of information levels from zero information to above average information levels where additional information does not yield higher returns the latter result implies that the value of additional information need not be strictly positive

an analysis of transactions data for the toronto stock exchange abstract using transactions data for all stocks traded on the toronto stock exchange this study shows that returns and number of shares traded have a u shaped pattern when plotted against time of the trading day these results confirm that the findings of wood mclnish and ord 1985 harris 1986 mclnish and wood 1988 and jain and joh 1989 for the new york stock exchange nyse also hold for both another exchange and another country and are not due to peculiarities of united states securities markets further evidence is provided to support the view of harris 1989 and terry 1986 that these relatively high end of day returns are due at least in part to an increase in the proportion of trades at the ask relative to trades at the bid

information dissemination and the distribution of wealth evidence from experimental asset markets abstract we conduct 24 experimental asset markets to investigate the effects of differentially informed and experienced agents on information dissemination and the distribution of wealth in our markets private information is incomplete in that it reduces but does not eliminate state uncertainty private information is not fully disseminated even in markets with experienced traders informed agents exploit their informational advantage and earn greater profit than uninformed agents but only in markets with inexperienced traders lastly uninformed agents earn greater profit when some agents are informed but only in markets with experienced traders overall uninformed agents benefit from design specific trading experience

trade size order imbalance and the volatility volume relation abstract this paper examines the roles of the number of trades size of trades and order imbalance buyer versus seller initiated trades in explaining the volatility volume relation for a sample of nyse and nasdaq stocks our results reconfirm the significance of the size of trades beyond that of the number of trades in the volatility volume relation on both markets after controlling for the return impact of order imbalance the volatility volume relation becomes much weaker for nyse stocks the order imbalance in large trade size categories affects the return more than in smaller size categories for nasdaq stocks the largest return impact comes from the order imbalance in maximum sized small order execution system soes trades

tax innovation in the states capitalizing on political opportunity this paper assesses the factors that prompt states to adopt taxes during the twentieth century we test five explanations of state tax innovation derived from the literature economic development fiscal health election cycle party control and regional diffusion using event history analysis a pooled cross sectional time series technique while little support is found for the economic development and party control explanations our empirical results are highly consistent with a political opportunity explanation of state tax adoptions 1 the presence of a long time until the next election 2 the existence of a fiscal crisis and 3 the presence of neighboring states that have previously adopted a tax all create opportunities for politicians to shield themselves from the political costs of supporting a tax increase and are all shown by empirical analysis to increase the probability of a tax adoption this empirical evidence is consistent across different tax instruments and different periods of analysis throughout the twentieth century

autocorrelation of daily index returns intraday to intraday versus close to close intervals abstract first order autocorrelation coefficients of 1 daily equally weighted open to open returns 2 daily equally weighted intraday to intraday returns terminating at each of 23 successive 15 minute intervals of the trading day beginning at 10 15 a m and 3 daily equally weighted and value weighted close to close returns interval 24 are examined a number of findings concerning the behavior of these autocorrelations are reported first order autocorrelation is shown to follow a crude u shaped pattern when plotted against the time of the trading day but there is no significant difference in the behavior of autocorrelations based on open to open returns and 24 hour returns terminating at 10 15 a m evidence that intraday patterns in autocorrelation cannot be explained fully by trading delays also is presented

trading and returns under periodic market closures this paper studies how market closures affect investors trading policies and the resulting return generating process it shows that closures generate rich patterns of time variation in trading and returns including those consistent with empirical findings 1 u shaped patterns in the mean and volatility of returns over trading periods 2 higher trading activity around the close and open 3 more volatile open to open returns than close to close returns 4 higher returns over trading periods than over nontrading periods 5 more volatile returns over trading periods than over nontrading periods it also shows that closures can make prices more informative about future payoffs we model a competitive stock market with periodic closures in which investors trade for both allocational and informational reasons we use the model to study how market closures intrinsically affect investors trading behavior and the return generating process the purpose of this analysis is to increase our understanding of the time variation in security trading and returns that are associated with regular market closures such as the intraday and intraweek patterns in stock returns volatility and trading volume we consider a stock market in which the exogenous information flow is homogeneous over time and the market closes periodically when the market is open investors trade the stock either to rebalance their overall portfolio of assets which also includes other illiquid assets or to speculate on future stock payoffs using their private information in particular investors adjust their asset portfolio by trading the stock in order to hedge the risk of illiquid assets we refer to these trades as hedging trades and those motivated by private information as speculative trades when the market is closed hong is from the graduate school of business stanford university and wang is from the sloan school of management massachusetts institute of technology and nber the authors thank jennifer huang for programming assistance and an anonymous referee for many valuable suggestions they also thank glenn ellison john heaton craig holden andrew lo steve slezak jeremy stein rene stulz the editor the nber asset pricing lunch group and par

otc trades and liquidity in the european carbon market more than meets the eye this study investigates whether the previously reported price impact of otc trades in the eu ets can be attributed to their distinctively larger size liquidity related or to their discretionary f

economic security and value change confirming inglehart s prediction 1971 of an intergenerational shift toward postmaterialist values a time series analysis controlling for the joint effects of inflation and unemployment demonstrates that there is a statistically significant trend toward postmaterialism in all eight west european countries for which data are available over the past two decades evidence from the 1981 83 and 1990 91 world values surveys indicates that this value shift occurs in any society that has experienced sufficient economic growth in recent decades so that the preadult experiences of younger birth cohorts were significantly more secure than those of older cohorts large intergenerational differences tend to be found in societies that have experienced rapid growth in gross national product per capita and are negligible in societies that have had little or no growth accordingly postmaterialism increased in 18 of the 20 societies on five continents for which we have comparable data over the past decade

a transaction data study of weekly and intradaily patterns in stock returns abstract weekly and intradaily patterns in common stock prices are examined using transaction data for large firms negative monday close to close returns accrue between the friday close and the monday open for smaller firms they accrue primarily during the monday trading day for all firms significant weekday differences in intraday returns accrue during the first 45 minutes after the market opens on monday mornings prices drop while on the other weekday mornings they rise otherwise the pattern of intraday returns is similar on all weekdays most notable is an increase in prices on the last trade of the day

calendar anomalies abnormal returns at calendar turning points 1988 calendar anomalies abnormal returns at calendar turning points financial analysts journal vol 44 no 6 pp 28 39

futures trading with information asymmetry and otc predominance another look at the volume volatility relations in the european carbon markets this paper constitutes the first exercise of analysing the european carbon market efficiency from a double perspective combining both nature of execution venues screen vs otc trading and their volatility liquidity relations using a bivariate asymmetric gjr garch model we first document that otc exchange traded trading volume shows consistent bi uni directional granger causality to our volatility estimates consistent with greater responsiveness of the otc exchange traded market to changes in market wide idiosyncratic risks second we report significant contemporaneous and lagged positive causality of otc derivatives volume on spot futures volatility confirming that the sequential information arrival hypothesis siah applies third we find that the one way causality from otc to futures volumes is mainly driven by heterogeneous investor beliefs trading volume provides an indication on how private information is dispersed and held at different levels rather than proxying information signal itself after rejecting execution venues substitutability we advocate for systematic clearing and netting of otc positions through a unique clearing house and reporting rules to identify speculation in line with mifid art 59 proposals

standard poor s 500 index futures volatility and price changes around the new york stock exchange close we examine the effects of the closing of the new york stock exchange nyse on volatility and price changes in the standard poor s s p futures market which trades for 15 more minutes each day when the nyse closes volatility in the futures market drops significantly only to increase at the close of the futures market thus exhibiting a u shaped pattern after the nyse closes we also find that friday s close is the period of highest volatility in the futures market also in the final minutes on friday the s p futures price anticipates the well known weekend effect found in equities copyright 1995 by university of chicago press

the italian stock market efficiency and calendar anomalies abstract after describing the various concepts of efficiency information valuation full insurance and functional with special reference to the italian stock market the paper analyzes the impact of particular dates and periods of the civil year and stock exchange calendars on stock price changes to test the existence of information inefficiencies the analysis is based on the milan stock exchange s mib storico stock index with reference to the period 2 january 1975 22 august 1989 the events tested for systematic anomalies include weekend and public holidays the end of the calendar and stock exchange months and the end of the year the results obtained are in line with those found for the u s market with evidence of anomalous changes though not all are stable over time

trading behavior and the unbiasedness of the market reaction to dividend announcements this article examines the price formation process during dividend announcement day using daily closing prices and transactions data we find that the unconditional positive excess returns first documented by kalay and loewenstein 1985 are higher for small firm and low priced stocks price volatility and trading volume also increase during this period examination of trade prices relative to the bid ask spread and volume of trades at bid and asked prices shows that the excess returns cannot be attributed to measurement errors or to spillover effects of tax related ex day trading rather the price behavior is related to the absorption of dividend information

perspectives of natural resource sector firms on collaborative approaches to governance for water firms in the natural resource sector forestry mining oil and gas and hydroelectric power production are dependent on water in their operations they also affect water quality and quantity through their practices in response to rising costs increasingly restrictive regulations reduced water availability and growing public criticism of industrial water use and management practices companies are attempting to improve their environmental performance one approach being used by firms in the natural resource sector is participation in collaborative multi actor approaches to governance for water a policy delphi survey of 22 representatives from firms in canada s natural resource sector was used to explore the benefits and challenges flowing from natural resource sector firm participation in multi actor collaborative processes the panel identified and then evaluated 67 positions regarding roles benefits and challenges panelists clearly saw many benefits and challenges to companies from becoming engaged in collaborative processes they also were also aware of ways in which the participation of large firms in multi actor collaborative initiatives can create both benefits and challenges for those initiatives the fact that natural resource sector firms do not have to give up their traditional avenues of influence to participate in collaborative initiatives raises concerns about the long term viability of collaboration as a governance strategy

institutional trades and intraday stock price behavior abstract this paper examines the price effect of institutional stock trading using a unique data set that reports the transactions large and small of 37 large institutional money management firms the direction of each trade and the identity of the management firm behind each trade are known although institutional trades are associated with some price pressure we find that the average effect is small there is also a marked asymmetry between the price impact of buys versus sells we relate our findings to various hypotheses on the elasticity of demand for stocks the cost of executing transactions and the determinants of market impact although market capitalization and relative trade size influence the market impact of a trade the dominant influence is the identity of the money manager behind the trade

do investors overpay for stocks with lottery like payoffs an examination of the returns of otc stocks abstract we study returns on over the counter stocks and find that these returns are extremely negative on average the distribution of otc stock returns is highly positively skewed while many of the stocks in our sample become worthless a few do extremely well we investigate whether this negative return premium can be rationalized by investors preference for positively skewed payoffs we show that the equilibrium model of barberis and huang 2008 provides a plausible explanation for the negative returns we also show that otc stocks that once traded on the regular exchanges perform much better than stocks that originate in the otc markets

payments for environmental services in watersheds insights from a comparative study of three cases in central america we have compared three cases of payments for water related environmental services pes in central america in terms of socioeconomic background opportunity costs of forest conservation and stakeholders perceptions of the conditions of water resources and other issues we found that in general the opportunity costs are larger than the amounts paid which apparently contradicts the economic foundation of pes schemes and suggests that the role of intangibles is important in inducing participation the results also show that trade offs between different environmental and social goals are likely to emerge in pes schemes posing some doubts as to their ability to be multipurpose instruments for environmental improvement and rural development we also found that pes schemes may work as a conflict resolution instrument facilitating downstream upstream problem solving though at the same time they might introduce changes in social perceptions of property rights