a composite leading indicator of the inflation cycle for the euro area we evaluate the performance of composite leading indicators of turning points of inflation in the euro area constructed by combining the techniques of fourier analysis and kalman filters with the national bureau of economic research methodology in addition the study compares the empirical performance of euro simple sum and divisia monetary aggregates and provides a tentative answer to the issue of whether or not the uk should join the euro area our findings suggest that first the cyclical pattern of the different composite leading indicators very closely reflect that of the inflation cycle for the euro area second the empirical performance of the euro divisia is better than its simple sum counterpart and third the uk is better out of the euro area 2005 taylor francis group ltd

program trading and expiration day effects the arbitrage between index futures and the underlying cash index and the cash settlement feature of index futures contracts which requires arbitrageurs to unwind positions in the stock market are thought to be at the heart of the abnormal stock price movements during the triple witching hour the last hour of trading on days on which index futures index options and options on index futures expire simultaneously during 1984 and 1985 volume was substantially higher than normal in the last hour of trading on those quarterly fridays open interest in the expiring futures contracts on the expiration day amounted to about 40 per cent of the average month end open interest the incremental stock market volume however was approximately one third the volume that would be inmplied if the entire expiration day open interest were traded in the stock market analysis of stock market price changes in the last hour of expiration days and the first halfhour of the following day indicates that the volatility of price changes was significantly higher on expiration days with the stock market tending to fall stocks not in the sp index option expirations themselves did not lead to abnormal market movements when the magnitude of price effects was measured by the degree of reversal in prices on the morning after the expiration day the average magnitude of the price effect in the 10 most recent quarterly futures contract expirations examined was about 0 4 per cent of the closing index value at expiration the average expiration day price effect of 0 4 per cent is not large considering that a price impact of approximately 0 25 per cent of the value of the transaction can be expected on the basis of the bid ask spread once this market impact cost is drawn out the average expiration day price impact falls to about 0 15 per cent of the value of the transaction an amount representing the additional cost of liquidity furthermore price impacts in excess of those found on expiration days are frequently encountered in large block transactions where the cost of providing liquidity also increases on expiration days however transactions in many stocks occur simultaneously so the market as a whole is affected

how does the stock market absorb shocks abstract using a comprehensive set of news stories we find a stark difference in market responses to positive and negative price shocks accompanied by new information when there is a news story about a firm positive price shocks are followed by reversal while negative ones result in drift this is interpreted as the stock market overreaction to good news and underreaction to bad news these seemingly contradictory results can be explained in a single framework considering the interaction of retail investors with attention bias and arbitrageurs with short run capital constraints consistent with this hypothesis we find that both patterns are stronger when the attention bias is stronger and when the arbitrage capital is scarce

cyclical industrial dynamics in the global it sector origins and sequencing in this article we investigate the origins and dynamics of cyclical behaviour in the it sector our lead lag analysis shows the historical cyclical patterns involved in the global semiconductor industry the computer industry and the flat panel display industry based on the granger causality tests derived from a vector autoregressive var model we find that in the global semiconductor industry changes in capacity utilization precede changes in sales which in turn leads to changes in semiconductor price

a market microstructure explanation for predictable variations in stock returns following large price changes prior empirical evidence of predictable variations in stock returns following large price changes is found to be at least in part driven by the sample selection bias arising from the systematic movement of closing transaction prices within the bid ask spread by using the average of the bid ask prices in the sample selection process the price reversal on the day following the events day 1 disappears for a short run period after day 1 however systematic abnormal return patterns are still observed these short run price reversals persist even after controlling for the influence of systematic trading patterns around the events however investigation of contrarian investment profits from these short run price reversals shows that the average abnormal returns are not large enough to cover the transaction price movement between the bid and ask prices

predicting turning points in the uk inflation cycle inflation targeting is an important component of current u k economic policy and this paper examines the forecasting of inflation turning points using leading indicators the authors identify nine complete inflation cycles between 1958 and 1993 leading indicators are proposed with composite shorter and longer leading indicators constructed on the basis of data to june 1992 overall the composite indicators give clear prior turning point information with relatively few false signals they exhibit leads at peaks which are generally longer than at troughs correspondingly the authors find that inflation troughs are generally more difficult to predict than peaks coauthors are r c bladen hovell denise r osborn graham smith and w zhang copyright 1995 by royal economic society

do markets learn to rationally expect us interest rates an anchoring approach we propose an augmented and dynamic forecast anchoring model to examine whether a group of rational forecasters coexists with or emerges besides a group of forecasters employing heuristic rules th

expectation formation mechanisms profitability of foreign exchange trading and exchange rate volatility an attempt is made to identify the expectation formation mechanism dominating the foreign exchange market and to demonstrate that exchange rate volatility can be attributed to the heterogeneity of traders with respect to expectation formation the criterion used to identify the dominance of a particular mechanism is the profitability of trading based on that mechanism it is concluded that mixed and extrapolative expectations are the dominant mechanisms that market participants follow some sort of a herd behaviour and that they pay attention to the expectations of other participants it is also found that the heterogeneity of market participants with respect to expectation formation goes a long way towards explaining volatility

divisia money in a composite leading indicator of inflation the principal objective of this paper is to compare the performance of the divisia m4 monetary index with the standard simple sum measure of broad money in the context of composite leading indicators of inflation in the united kingdom inflation targeting is an important component of current uk monetary policy and the construction of composite leading indicators of inflation is a potential advance over the current practice of monitoring a range of indicators of inflation the leading indicators proposed provide useful turning point information for inflation and advocate principal component analysis as a more sophisticated weighting mechanism for the constituent components indicators constructed using a divisia index measure of money were found to be more closely related to the inflation reference cycle than indicators using their simple sum counterparts when a principal components weighting mechanism was used

volume volatility and new york stock exchange trading halts trading halts increase rather than reduce both volume and volatility volume volatility in the first full trading day after a trading halt is 230 percent 50 to 115 percent higher than following pseudohalts nonhalt control periods matched on time of day duration and absolute net of market returns these results are robust over different halt types and news categories higher posthalt volume is observed into the third day while higher posthalt volatility decays within hours the extent of media coverage is a partial determinant of volume and volatility following both halts and pseudohalts but a separate halt effect remains after controlling for the media effect in the wake of the 1987 market break a number of commentators including the presidential task force on market mechanisms recommended the establishment of circuit breaker mechanisms the primary argument supporting circuit breakers both price limits and trading halts is that nontrading periods provide an opportunity for normal information transmission in times of market duress proponents of circuit breakers claim that during major price changes there can be a breakdown in the transmission of information between the trading floor and market participants therefore the primary function of a circuit breaker should be to reinform participants greenwald and stein 1988 p 17 by lowering informational asymmetries between traders halts could permit the orderly emergence of a new consensus price but would informative trading halts succeed many academics are openly suspicious of any kind of market interference and assume that trading halts are guilty until proven innocent grossman 1990 p 3 for example argues that the closing of markets merely prevents consenting adults from carrying out their desires on the floor of the stock exchange not only do halts impose a liquidity cost on traders but studies suggest that information will not be as

commodity prices how important are real and nominal shocks we consider the response of both nominal and real commodity prices on world markets to real and nominal shocks by hypothesizing that nominal shocks can permanently affect nominal commodity prices but can have only temporary effects on real commodity prices real shocks in contrast can have permanent as well as temporary effects on both nominal and real commodity prices when nominal and real shocks are decomposed in this manner real shocks are found to be of much greater importance to the observed movements in commodity prices we use the blanchard and quah bq 1989 decomposition to obtain the permanent and temporary components of the real commodity price series and relate this to the rate of growth of world industrial production as an indicator of business cycle movements the results suggest that the impact of the business cycle is self stabilizing in that there is an initial positive effect on growth in commodity prices followed by a fully offsetting negative effect

public information arrival we develop a measure of public information flow to financial markets and use it to document the patterns of information arrival with an emphasis on the intraday flows the measure is the number of news releases by reuter s news service per unit of time we find that public information arrival is nonconstant displaying seasonalities and distinct intraday patterns next we relate our measure of public information to aggregate measures of intraday market activity our results suggest a positive moderate relationship between public information and trading volume but an insignificant relationship with price volatility

the behavior of stock prices around institutional trades all trades executed by 37 large investment management firms from july 1986 to december 1988 are used to study the price impact and execution cost of the entire sequence package of trades that we interpret as an order we find that market impact and trading cost are related to firm capitalization relative package size and most importantly to the identity of the management firm behind the trade money managers with high demands for immediacy tend to be associated with larger market impact financial economists have long studied the equity trading process and its impact on stock prices much prior empirical research isolates individual trades and analyzes the behavior of the stock price around each trade see for example kraus and stoll 1972a holthausen leftwich and mayers 1987 1990 keim and madhavan 1991 petersen and umlauf 1991 hausman lo and mackinlay 1992 and chan and lakonishok 1993 evaluating the behavior of stock prices around trades provides a means of discriminating among various hypotheses as to the elasticity of the demand for stocks yields an estimate of the cost of executing trades and a measure of the liquidity of a market and permits tests of different models of the determination of quotes and transaction prices for many institutional investors however even a moderately sized position in a stock may represent a large fraction of the stock s trading volume accordingly an investment manager s order is often broken up into several trades it is often misleading therefore to consider an individual trade as the basic unit of analysis in the study of trading activity and its effects on prices this paper uses the record of trades executed by 37 large investment manage

how markets process information news releases and volatility we examine the impact of scheduled macroeconomic news announcements on interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets we find these announcements are responsible for most of the observed time of day and day of the week volatility patterns in these markets while the bulk of the price adjustment to a major announcement occurs within the first minute volatility remains substantially higher than normal for roughly fifteen minutes and slightly elevated for several hours nonetheless these subsequent price adjustments are basically independent of the first minute s return we identify those announcements with the greatest impact on these markets we examine the impact on interest rate and foreign exchange markets of scheduled macroeconomic news releases such as the employment report the consumer price index cpi and the producer price index ppi many market participants believe that such announcements have a major impact on financial markets indeed a small industry devoted to predicting the figures to be released in upcoming releases has evolved in recent years with the exception of the weekly money supply figures however the impact of such announcements on financial markets has received scant attention 1 this is doubly surprising given the considerable research interest in market volatility since these news releases are a potential source of much of this volatility consider for instance figure 1 as shown there prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets are much more volatile between 8 30 and 8 35 a m eastern time et than during any other five minute trading period including

the impact of public information on the stock market we study the relation between the number of news announcements reported daily by dow jones company and aggregate measures of securities market activity including trading volume and market returns we find that the number of dow jones announcements and market activity are directly related and that the results are robust to the addition of factors previously found to influence financial markets such as day of the week dummy variables news importance as proxied by large new york times headlines and major macroeconomic announcements and non information sources of market activity as measured by dividend capture and triple witching trading however the observed relation between news and market activity is not particularly strong and the patterns in news announcements do not explain the day of the week seasonalities in market activity our analysis of the dow jones database confirms the difficulty of linking volume and volatility to observed measures of information

unifying underreaction anomalies this paper asks whether momentum and postevent drift are manifestations of the same underlying mechanism or are separate phenomena we find that both effects can be attributed to persistence in returns following news that affects expected earnings or earnings growth holding these quantities fixed there is no momentum effect nor is there postevent drift for our sample of events which includes seasoned equity offerings repurchases equity financed mergers and dividend initiations and omissions the implication is that return continuation follows fundamental news in general and in aggregate this explains momentum

volume and autocovariances in short horizon individual security returns this article tests for the relations between trading volume and subsequent returns patterns in individual securities short horizon returns that are suggested by such articles as blume easley and o hara 1994 and campbell grossman and wang 1993 using a variant of lehmann s 1990 contrarian trading strategy we find strong evidence of a relation between trading activity and subsequent autocovariances in weekly returns specifically high transaction securities experience price reversals while the returns of low transactions securities are positively autocovarying overall information on trading activity appears to be an important predictor of the returns of individual securities

risk aversion uncertain information and market efficiency abstract this paper develops and tests the uncertain information hypothesis as a means of explaining the response of rational risk averse investors to the arrival of unanticipated information the theory predicts that following news of a dramatic financial event both the risk and expected return of the affected companies increase systematically and that prices react more strongly to bad news than good an empirical investigation of over 9000 marketwide and firm specific events produces results consistent with these predictions we conclude that the market reacts to uncertain information in an efficient if not instantaneous manner

stock returns following large one day declines evidence on short term reversals and longer term performance we examine stock returns following large one day price declines and find that the bid ask bounce and the degree of market liquidity explain short term price reversals further we do not find evidence consistent with the overreaction hypothesis we observe that securities with large one day price declines perform poorly over an extended time horizon while the concept of market overreaction has been noted for many years its formal description and examination is a relatively recent area of study debondt and thaler 1985 define the overreaction hypothesis as the overresponse to new information this hypothesis suggests that extreme movements in stock prices are followed by movements in the opposite direction to correct the initial overreaction and that the greater the magnitude of initial price change the more extreme the offsetting reaction one manner in which the overreaction hypothesis has been studied is the analysis of stock returns following large one day stock price declines brown harlow and tinic 1988 and atkins and dyl 1990 find significant reversals for stocks that experience one day price declines focusing on extreme price movements bremer and sweeney 1991 examine returns following one day price declines of 10 percent or more for fortune 500 firms that are in the center for research in security prices crsp data files they find significant positive three day abnormal returns over the period 1962 to 1986 and note that this three day recovery is inconsistent with stock prices fully and quickly reflecting relevant information they also suggest that market illiquidity may partially explain their findings the purpose of this study is to explain security return behavior following large one day declines our primary objective is to explore the role of the bid ask bounce market liquidity and overreaction in explaining price reversals in the three day period immediately following large one day declines large one day price declines are likely to be associated with substantial selling pressure enhancing the probability that a closing transaction is at a

efficiency and formation of expectations evidence from the european investment survey the european commission conducts an annual survey regarding planned and realized business fixed investment across various manufacturing sectors in euroland in this study we investigate the predictive content of survey based expectations on investment in addition we empirically test the rationality of respondents both in a time series as well as in a panel context according to our results based on pooling the data efficiency is rejected since expectations are biased predictors of actual outcomes furthermore expectations revisions are found to be correlated with components of the information set known at the time of decision making finally our results qualify regressive expectations as the mechanism that more adequately describes the formation of expectations

differential interpretation of public signals and trade in speculative markets most models of trade in speculative markets assume that agents interpret public information identically we provide empirical evidence on the relation between the volume of trade and stock returns around public announcements and we argue that the evidence is inconsistent with this assumption we then develop a model of trade around public announcements that incorporates differential interpretations and is consistent with the observed volume return relation then we test the standard model of belief revision underlying most models of trade using stock brokerage research analysts earnings forecasts the hypthesis of identical interpretations seems inconsistent with the forecast revisions in these data

testing the rationality of exchange rate and interest rate expectations an empirical study of australian survey based expectations this paper examines the rationality of the australian survey based expectations 1 and 4 week ahead us a exchange rate and 2 and 4 week ahead australian 90 day bank bill and 10 year bond rates the actual and expected variables are found to be cointegrated indicating that the expected future values and the future realizations of the exchange rate and interest rates have long run equilibrium relationships ols estimations with the newey west corrections are employed for testing the unbiased expectations hypothesis ueh where the frequency of the expectations data is finer than the forecast horizons and the exponential garch models that take into account the time varying nature of the forecasterror variance are employed for testing the weak rational expectations hypothesis wreh the evidence shows that the wreh could not be rejected in any case except for the two week ahead forecast of the 90 day interest rate which indicates that all available information is used at the time of forming relevant

do dollar forecasters believe too much in ppp this article extends earlier studies on exchange rate expectations formation by using new data and adding information about forecasters reliance on fundamental analysis for the first time we replicate the conventional result of nonrational expectations moreover biases in expectations are identified as professionals significantly believe too much in mean reversion mean being represented by purchasing power parity ppp when respondents are grouped on their reliance to fundamental analysis fundamentalists reveal an even stronger bias those who rely the least on fundamentals preferring technical analysis instead show a significantly smaller bias towards ppp in lieu of expecting too much trend extrapolation biased beliefs will grow stronger when the us dollar is further away from ppp finally the accuracy of the expectations is poor for both groups however we find directional forecasting ability

tax induced trading around ex dividend days abstract this paper investigates trading volume around ex dividend days for taxable distributions cash dividends it is found that trading volume increases significantly around the ex dividend day this increase is more pronounced for high yield actively traded stocks and after brokerage commissions became negotiable the results are consistent with the hypothesis that short term traders have an impact on ex day price behavior at least for taxable distributions for non taxable distributions stock splits and stock dividends we find negative abnormal volume around ex day

the dependence between hourly prices and trading volume this study provides evidence on joint characteristics of hourly common stock trading vol ume and returns on the new york stock exchange average volume traded shows signifi cant differences across trading hours of the day and across days of the week average returns differ across hours ofthe day and to some extent across days ofthe week there is a strong contemporaneous relation between trading volume and returns and also a rela tion between trading volume and returns lagged up to four hours furthermore the trading volume returns relation is steeper for positive returns than for nonpositive returns

the adjustment of stock prices to information about inflation this paper analyzes the reaction of stock prices to the new information about inflation based on daily returns to the standard and poor s composite portfolio from 1953 78 it seems that the stock market reacts negatively to the announcement of unexpected inflation in the consumer price index c p i although the magnitude of the reaction is small it is interesting to note that the stock market seems to react at the time of announcement of the c p i approximately one month after the price data are collected by the bureau of labor statistics

the dartboard column second hand information and price pressure this study analyzes the effect of second hand information on the behavior of security prices and volume using analysts recommendations published in the monthly dartboard column of the wall street journal for the two days following the publication of the recommendations average positive abnormal returns of 4 percent nearly twice the level of abnormal returns documented in previous research on analyst recommendations and average volume double normal volume levels on the two days following publication of the recommendations are documented the positive abnormal return on announcement is partially reversed within 25 trading days the authors conclude that the positive abnormal return on announcement of the recommendations is a result of naive buying pressure as well as the information content of the analysts recommendations

rationality of survey data and tests for market efficiency in the foreign exchange markets abstract this paper tests the rational expectations hypothesis reh and the market efficiency hypothesis meh in the foreign exchange markets using survey data on expectations our results show that the spot exchange rates expected exchange rates and the forward rates all follow a random walk process hence the cointegration theory is employed to test the reh and meh all the test statistics support the reh but fail to support the meh we use survey data on expectations to identify the causes behind this failure of the meh jel f31 g14

intraday volume and volatility relations with and without public news this paper reexamines the dynamic relation between intraday trading volume and return volatility of large and small nyse stocks in two partitioned samples with and without identifiable public news we argue that the sequential information arrival hypothesis siah can be tested only in periods containing public news after partitioning the sample into periods with and without public news we find bi directional granger causality between volume and volatility in the presence of public information as hypothesized by the siah our analysis further suggests that return volatility is higher in the periods with public news while trading volume is significantly higher in the no news period perhaps owing to the importance of private information for trading stocks using the sample without public news we find evidence that volume granger causes volatility without feedback these results are broadly consistent with behavioral models like the overconfidence and biased self attribution model of daniel k hirshleifer d subrahmanyam a 1998 investor psychology and security market under and over reactions journal of finance 53 1839 1885 it appears that overconfident investors overrate the precision of their private news signals and therefore trade too aggressively in the absence of public news when public news arrives investors biased self attribution triggers excessive return volatility

return predictability following large price changes and information releases abstract we examine return behavior following large price change events unconditional post event abnormal returns are found to be unimportant as we condition on other criteria related to the quality of information like volume and public announcements the abnormal returns become large the type of news provides further refinement if the news relates to earnings or analyst recommendations then the 20 day abnormal returns become much larger ranging from 3 to 4 for positive events and about 2 25 for negative events finally an out of sample trading strategy confirms investor under reaction and generates significant abnormal annualized returns of the order of 12 18

the reversal of large stock price decreases extremely large negative 10 day rates of return are followed on average by largerthan expected positive rates of return over following days this price adjustment lasts approximately 2 days and is observed in a sample of firms that is largely devoid of methodological problems that might explain the reversal phenomenon while perhaps not representing abnormal profit opportunities these reversals present a puzzle as to the length of the price adjustment period such a slow recovery is inconsistent with the notion that market prices quickly reflect relevant information recent research on stock returns has uncovered a substantial number of empirical findings that are broadly inconsistent with popular asset pricing models for example keim and stambaugh 1985 cross 1973 french 1980 gibbons and hess 1981 and rogalski 1984 find evidence of day ofthe week and weekend effects on stock returns while banz 1981 and reinganum 1983 find evidence of a size effect this paper presents evidence of another empirical puzzle consider the behavior of a firm s rate of return on days after it has experienced a large negative one day rate of return less than say 10 observed daily stock returns after such an extreme event are significantly larger than average on following days for a 10 fall the return above average is 1 773 for the day after and rises cumulatively to 2 215 by the second day this multiple day price adjustment is observed in a sample of firms that is largely devoid of methodological problems that might explain the reversal phenomenon the major interest of this phenomenon is the long recovery period of the stock price reversal such a slow recovery is inconsistent with the notion that market prices fully and quickly reflect relevant information

further evidence on exchange rate expectations abstract this paper considers a previously unexploited survey data set of exchange rate expectations which allows us to focus on differences between ems and dollar exchange rates we corroborate the earlier finding in the literature that exchange rate forecasts are not rational and that agents do not use all available information efficiently although extrapolative and adaptive expectations formation mechanisms describe non ems exchange rate expectations to a certain extent ems exchange rates forecasts seem to follow long run fundamentals more closely and would suggest that agents believe that ems exchange rate expectations undershoot their long run equilibrium values jel f31

volatility in the foreign currency futures market we examine the volatility implications of around the clock foreign exchange trading with transaction data on futures contracts from the chicago mercantile exchange and the london international financial futures exchange we find higher u s european and u s japanese exchange rate volatilities during u s trading hours and higher european cross rate volatilities during european trading hours while the diclosure of private information through trading may partly explain these volatility patterns we conclude that the increased volatility is more likely driven by macroeconomic news announcements an analysis of inter and intraday data also reveals that volatility increases at times that coincide with the release of u s macroeconomic news article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

trading volume and serial correlation in stock returns this paper investigates the relationship between aggregate stock market trading volume and the serial correlation of daily stock returns for both stock indexes and individual large stocks the first order daily return autocorrelation tends to decline with volume the paper explains this phenomenon using a model in which risk averse market makers accommodate buying or selling pressure from liquidity or noninformational traders changing expected stock returns reward market makers for playing this role the model implies that a stock price decline on a high volume day is more likely than a stock price decline on a low volume day to be associated with an increase in the expected stock return

price reversals bid ask spreads and market efficiency we examine the behavior of common stock prices after a large change in price occurs during a single trading day and find evidence that the stock market appears to have overreacted especially in the case of price declines however the magnitude of the overreaction is small compared to the bid ask spreads observed for the individual stocks in the sample we interpret this finding as being consistent with a market that is efficient after transactions costs are considered