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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of equity market misvaluation on manager behavior. Using a sample of 535 French-listed over 2000–2018, the authors analyze whether corporate investment decision is sensitive to equity market overvaluation.

The study adopts market-to-book (M/B) decomposition developed by Rhodes-Kropf and Viswanathan (2004, RKV) that proxies for market misvaluation at the firm and industry levels. The authors conducted a long-term performance analysis via a portfolio sorting procedure and a Carhart (1997) four-factor pricing model. The authors tested the relationship between equity misvaluation, corporate investment decisions and equity issuance. The authors ran several robustness tests.

The empirical results show that equity market misvaluation affects corporate investment positively as the stock price deviates further away from its fundamental. Based on market timing theory, the authors find that corporate investment occurs in periods of high valuation motivated by equity issuance to benefit from the low cost of capital. This effect is more prominent for financially constrained firms. Consistent with the catering channel, the authors find that the misvaluation-investment nexus is more pronounced in firms with short-horizon investors. By examining the stocks’ long-term performance of misvalued firms, via a sorting portfolio procedure, the authors find that undervalued firms outperform and generate higher abnormal returns (Jensen’s alpha) than overvalued firms, suggesting that mispricing-driven investment appear to be short-lived and lead to lower return in the long term.

Corporate decision-makers and governance structures should pay attention to the rationality of the corporate investment decision in the context of equity market misvaluation. Managers who focus on maximizing the stock market value in the short-run at the expense of its long-term performance must give preference to value-creating investment, not driven by an external mechanism such as equity market mispricing. More generally, investors and portfolio managers must take into account the market mispricing process in decision-making. Nonetheless, from the portfolio sorting perspective, decision-makers must act in terms of high governance quality to mitigate suboptimal investment due to stock market mispricing (Jensen, 2005). Finally, equity market overvaluation, leading managers to invest via equity financing in particular, should be a signal to attract investors’ attention to seize the window of opportunity and embark on a short-term portfolio strategy. Such a strategy promises high returns in the short term.

This paper investigates jointly two theoretical channels: equity market timing and catering. The authors propose for the analysis three components of the M/B decomposition to dissociate market misvaluation at the firm and industry level from the fundamental component of market value (growth). This procedure provides a better understanding of the role of firm and industry misvaluation in explaining corporate investments. The authors provide evidence of the equity market misvaluation via a portfolio sorting procedure and a Carhart (1997) four-factor pricing model. The authors examine the effect of misvaluation on both the investment and the financing decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the misvaluation hypothesis using a relative reference point (RRP) in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market.

The paper studies 1,878 M&A deals in the US market announced between January 1985 and December 2014.

The paper finds that bidders prefer stock payments when the RRP increases. The RRP is positively related to the offer premium and the target announcement returns. Although the RRP is negatively related to the bidder announcement returns, it is positively related to the long-run performance of bidders who time the market with overvalued stocks. The results are consistent with the predictions of the misvaluation hypothesis and reference point (RP) theory.

The authors construct a dynamic valuation framework to explain the misvaluation hypothesis by linking M&As’ misvaluation with RP theory. This paper provides direct evidence that the reference-dependence bias is prevalent for more experienced investors in major corporate investment decisions and offers fresh insights into the method of payment hypothesis.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether bank mergers are driven by equity overvaluation and management compensation incentives.

To test whether equity mispricing drive bank mergers, the authors employ two alternative price-to-residual income valuation (P/V) measures for bidders and targets while the authors control for their growth prospects with the price-to-book (P/B) (two years before) ratio. The intrinsic value (V) is estimated using the three-period forecast horizon residual income model of Ohlson (1995) and perpetual residual income model that does not rely on analysts’ forecasts of future earnings prospects. The latter measure allows the authors to estimate V for a much larger sample of banks. The empirical analysis is supplemented with a standard event analysis and assessment of the long-term performance of bank mergers subsequent to the announcement date.

The evidence shows that bidders are overvalued relative to their targets, especially in equity offer deals. The authors also find that highly valued bidders: are more likely to use stock than cash; are willing to pay more relative to the target market price; are more likely to acquire private than public targets; earn lower announcement-period returns; fail to create synergy gains; experience long-term underperformance; and reward their top managers of with large compensation increases subsequent to mergers.

This study provides results consistent with the view that behavioral and managerial incentives play an important role in motivating bank mergers.

This paper aims to study the underpricing phenomenon of initial public offerings (IPOs) of 355 Indian companies issued from 2007 to 2019. The research question this paper empirically examines is whether Indian corporate executives deliberately underprice IPOs from its fair value to attract investors, thereby causing an abnormal spike in the prices on the listing day. The findings of this study challenge a commonly held notion of leaving money on the table by IPO issuing companies. Of the overall average listing day returns of 17%, the deliberate premarket underpricing component is found to be mere 5.3%, while the remaining price fluctuation is, inter alia, a result of market momentum along with the unmet demands of impatient investors.

Following Koop and Li (2001), this study uses Stochastic frontier model (SFM) to study a routine anomaly of disparity between the primary market price (i.e. IPO issue price) and the secondary market price (listing price). The jump in the issue price observed on a listing day is decomposed into deliberate premarket underpricing component that reflects the extent of managerial manipulation and the after-market misvaluation component attributable to information asymmetry and prevailing market volatility.

This paper uses SFM to bifurcate initial returns into deliberate underpricing by managers and after-market mispricing by noise traders. This study finds that a significant part of the initial return is explained through after-market mispricing. This study finds that average initial returns are 17%, deliberate premarket underpricing is 5.3% and after-market mispricing averages 11.9%.

This study can isolate underpricing done at the premarket by estimating a systematic one-sided error term that measures the maximum predicted issue price deviation from the offered price. Consequentially, the disaggregation of initial returns may be especially informative for retail investors in planning their exit strategy from an IPO by separating the strength of the firm's fundamentals and its causal relationship with the initial returns. Substantial proportion of after-market mispricing implies that future research should focus on factors causing after-market mispricing. As underlying causes are identified, tailor-made policy responses can be formulated to benefit investors.

This paper has empirically validated that initial return is a mix of both components, i.e. deliberate underpricing and aftermarket mispricing. This disaggregation of initial returns can prove helpful for investors in planning their exit strategy. This study can help investors to become more aware of the importance of the fundamentals of the firm and its causal relation with the initial returns. This information in turn can help reduce the information asymmetry amongst investors and help them lessen the costs of adverse selection.

A large number of research studies on IPO pricing find overwhelming evidence of underpricing in public issues. This research attempts to decompose the extent of underpricing into deliberate underpricing and after-market mispricing, thereby supplementing the existing literature on the IPO pricing puzzle. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first contribution to the literature on initial return decomposition for the Indian capital markets.

Prior literature suggests that managers have an incentive to increase stock prices prior to stock‐based acquisitions. This article aims to examine if there is any relationship between product market advertising and method of payments in mergers.

To examine the hypotheses the paper uses ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions and regressions based on a propensity score matching approach, which controls for the possibility that differences in firm characteristics are driving the results.

The paper finds that managers of firms that use stock to finance bids increase advertising intensity in the pre‐merger period and find that advertising is high prior to stock‐based mergers, relative to that of cash‐based acquirers. It also finds that managerial ownership in stock based acquiring firms is positively related to pre‐merger advertising intensity.

Although this paper examines whether stock‐based acquirers increase their advertising intensity in the pre‐merger period to gain economic benefit it does not discuss in detail through which mechanism advertising affects stock price.

The paper provides a new perspective on the relationship between product market advertising of the acquirer and the method of payment in mergers. The results shown in this paper may motivate investors of the target firms to re‐evaluate the acquirers offer if the medium of payment is acquirers own stock.

To the authors' knowledge this paper is the first to document the link between advertising prior to a merger and the method of payment used in that merger.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the long-run survival of earnings fixated traders.

This paper builds a theoretical model of a competitive securities market where both rational traders and earnings fixated traders receive an informational signal about the asset payoff before any trade occurs. Since earnings fixated traders underestimate the mean and variance of the risky asset payoff, earnings fixated traders is shown to make less expected profits than rational traders.

If traders’ types replicate according to the relative profitability of their trading strategies, then earnings fixated traders will disappear in the long run. The results of this paper provide analytical support to Tinic’s (1990) intuition about the eventual disappearance of earnings fixated traders.

In the literature, the underestimation of risk is popularly viewed as the cause of irrational traders being better able to exploit the misvaluations (created by noise traders) than rational traders. Hence, it favors the survival of irrational traders over rational traders. However, this paper disapproves this intuition in the informational environment of the competitive securities market.

The market environment plays a crucial role in determining the long-run survival of irrational traders.

This paper is the first to present a theoretical result showing that in this informational environment of the competitive securities market, the underestimation of risk by irrational traders does not give them advantage over rational traders in exploiting the misvaluations (created by noise traders) as it does in Callen and Luo (2011) and Hirshleifer and Luo (2001).

Hall (2001a) argues that the value of intangible assets can be inferred from firms’ stock market value and the value of tangible assets, which suggests rational valuation in the market. This paper investigates the relationship between firms’ future stock returns and their inferred intangibles and indirectly tests Hall’s hypothesis by using various trading strategies. It is found that the inferred intangibles have predictive power for stock returns, which might be because of mean‐reverting misvaluation by the stock market; and the way the inferred intangibles predict stock returns is consistent with the three‐factor model of Fama and French (1992). However, I find that the predictive power of inferred intangibles is consistent with market inefficiency, rather than a rational premium for distress risk related to the book‐to‐market equity ratio. Thus the intangible assets hypothesis of Hall does not hold and the discrepancy between market equity and book equity suggests market inefficiency.

This study creates a measure of investor sentiment directly from retail trader activity to identify misvaluation and to examine the link between sentiment and subsequent returns.

Using investor reports from a large discount brokerage that include measures of activity such as net buying, net new accounts and net new assets, this study creates a measure of retail trader sentiment using principal components. This study examines the relation between sentiment and returns through conditional mean and regression analyses.

Retail sentiment activity coincides with aggregate Google Trends search data and firms with the greatest sensitivity to retail sentiment tend to be small, young and volatile. Periods of high retail sentiment precede poor subsequent market returns. Cross-sectional results detail the strongest impact on subsequent returns within difficult to value or difficult to arbitrage firms.

This study links a rich measure of retail trader activity to subsequent market and cross-sectional returns. These results deepen our understanding of noise trader risk and aggregate investor sentiment.

This paper aims to investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic leads to the formation of herding behaviour among investors in Shariah-compliant stocks.

This study uses a sample of the stocks that constitute the Dow Jones Islamic Market Malaysia Titans 25 Index, over the period from 6 December 2017 to 12 March 2021.

This paper provides robust evidence on the contribution of the COVID-19 pandemic to the formation of herding behaviour in Shariah-compliant stocks. The findings also reveal that herding behaviour occurs only during falling market.

The findings provide useful implications for policymakers and portfolio managers seeking to understand the behaviour of investors in Shariah-compliant stocks during turbulent periods. The presence of herding behaviour begs the question on the market efficiency and limits its potential to offer diversification benefits to investors. The findings suggest that policymakers and investors should mitigate misvaluations that occurred during the COVID-19 outbreak because the herding behaviour can drive stock prices away from their equilibrium values. Thus, regulators should adopt appropriate policies to enable the market to reach a more efficient level by monitoring and improving the quality of information and facilitate their transmission to the market. The misevaluation opportunity enables market timers to sell overpriced stocks and purchase underpriced stocks. The findings also imply that investors should implement effective hedging strategies to mitigate the downside risk. In addition, the results suggest that investors should devise their trading strategies in falling and rising markets during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is meagre literature on the effect of the COVID-19 outbreak on the formation of herding behaviour among investors. Studies conducted on herd behaviour are widely focused on Shariah non-compliant stocks, only a few ones deal with Shariah-compliant stocks. The novelty of this paper consists in addressing this gap in the literature through examining the presence of herding behaviour on the part of investors in Shariah-compliant stocks in Malaysia before and after the COVID-19 outbreak.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the short-term and long-term wealth effects of two share repurchase motivations.

The authors use a multi-period numerical model and a Monte Carlo simulation. The Monte Carlo simulation introduces uncertainty into firms’ market values and eliminates some restrictions used in the numerical model.

In the long term, firms that refrain from repurchasing overvalued shares outperform otherwise identical firms that do not exhibit such restraint. In the short term, firms that repurchase overvalued shares can outperform firms that refrain from such repurchases. Total returns are a function of misvaluation, the firm’s repurchase decision, the rate of return on invested cash and how long the shares remain misvalued. Share price volatility can influence share repurchase decisions.

The models are incapable of fully modeling the complexities of a dynamic economic environment.

Managers and investors need to be aware of the short-term and long-term effects of share repurchases. Additionally, investors can gain insight into a firm’s share repurchase motivation by observing its cash balances over time.

Share repurchases are a zero-sum game with potentially different short-term and long-term wealth effects.

When studying the wealth effects of share repurchases, it is important to consider the motivations for repurchasing shares as well as the short-term and long-term effects.