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High levels of turnover in financial markets are consistent with the notion that trading, like gambling, yields direct utility to some agents. The purpose of this paper is to show that the presence of these agents attenuates covariance risk pricing and volatility, and implies a negative relation between volume and future returns. Since psychological literature indicates that the desirability of a gamble arises from the ex ante volatility of the outcome, the authors propose that agents derive greater utility from trading more volatile stocks. These stocks earn lower average returns in equilibrium, although the risk premium on the market portfolio is positive. The authors then consider a dynamic setting where agents’ utility from trading increases when they make positive profits in earlier rounds (e.g. due to an endowment effect). This leads to “bubbles,” i.e. disproportionate jumps in asset returns as a function of past prices, higher volume in up markets relative to down markets, as well as a leverage effect, wherein down markets are followed by higher volatility than up markets.

Analytical.

The presence of gamblers attenuates covariance risk pricing and volatility, and implies a negative relation between volume and future returns. If gamblers prefer more volatile stocks, these stocks earn lower average returns in equilibrium. If agents’ utility from trading increases when they make positive profits in earlier rounds (e.g. to an endowment effect), this leads to higher volume and lower volatility in up markets relative to down markets.

No paper has previously modeled agents who derive direct utility from trading.

We argue that uninformed subscribers to an initial public offering (IPO) of common stocks are exposed to greater ex ante risk of trading against informed traders in the secondary market because the advent of public trading conveys hitherto private information and thereby mitigates adverse selection. The going‐public firm underprices the new issue to compensate uninformed subscribers for this added secondary market adverse selection risk. We test this market liquidity‐based explanation by investigating the ex‐post consequences of ownership structure choice on the initial pricing and the secondary market liquidity of a sample of initial public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Consistent with our argument, we find that initial underpricing varies directly with the ex post trading costs in the secondary market. Further, initial underpricing is related positively to the concentration of institutional shareholdings and negatively to the proportional equity ownership retained by the founding shareholders. Finally, the secondary market illiquidity of new issues is positively related to institutional ownership concentration and negatively to ownership retention and underwriter reputation. Thus, the evidence based on our NYSE sample supports the view that the entrepreneurs' choice of ownership structure affects both the initial pricing and the subsequent market liquidity of new issues.

We analyze trading activity accompanying equities’ switches from “growth” (low book‐tomarket ratios (BMRs)) to “value” (high BMRs), and vice versa. We find that a large BMR increase, that is a shift from growth to value, is accompanied by a strongly negative small order imbalance (OIB). Large OIB exhibits weaker patterns across stocks that experience large changes in book/market. The evidence indicates that growth‐to‐value shifts are more strongly related to small traders than large ones. The interaction of BMRs with order flows plays a crucial role in return predictability. Specifically, the predictive ability of BMRs for future returns is significantly enhanced for those stocks that have experienced book/market increases as well as high levels of net selling by way of small orders.

When agents first become active investors in financial markets, they are relatively inexperienced. Much of the literature focuses on the incentives of presumably sophisticated informed agents to produce information, and not on the nave agents. However, unsophisticated agents are important aspects of financial markets and worth analyzing further. In this paper, we provide a theoretical perspective that addresses the issue of how many nave traders would one expect in a financial market where policy makers try to educate the nave agents.We show that such policy balances the effects of nave trades on corporate investment and liquidity, as well as the monetary cost of increasing financial sophistication. The optimal proportion of nave agents varies with the value of information, the noise in private signals, and the inherent sensitivity of corporate investment to prices.We also show that the policy tool of encouraging insider trading can deter nave investors and thus improve corporate governance and the efficacy of corporate investment.

Terrorism, an important component of Political risk as a possible determinant of ADRs (American Depository Receipts) returns have received little attention in academic literature. To address this issue and examine whether political risk is a major determinant of ADR returns of emerging market countries, this paper empirically examines market valuation of Indian ADRs around acts of terrorism. Using a sample of 52 such events in the sample period Jan 2003‐Dec 2003 we empirically analyze returns of Indian ADRs. The results from our study indicate a marginally negative significant effect, failing to indicate that event of terrorist attacks severely affect the Indian ADRs listed on the US stock market. This may be explained by a combined effect of; (a) the optimism of US investors towards emerging markets, and (b) market participants becoming more resilient and making informed choices around the “general” events of terrorism.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the influence of mood/emotions and religious experience on Islamic stock markets during the Ramadan month.

This study uses stock returns data of two countries – Saudi Arabia and Iran – from January 2008 to September 2014 and the ARMA-GARCH models to study impact of the Ramadan month on the return and volatility of the stock market in these two countries.

The results of this study show some differences in the impact of the Ramadan month on the return and volatility of the stock market in these two countries. While the Ramadan month has a significant positive influence on the mean returns and the volatility of the Saudi market, its influence on the Iranian market is found to be insignificant. Further analysis on the last ten days of the Ramadan month provides a similar result for the Saudi market. However, for the Iranian market, volatility is significantly negatively affected during these last ten days.

Most prior studies have found significant changes in returns during the Ramadan month but a deeper understanding of this stock market anomaly is needed. The results point toward the influence of mood/emotions and religious experience in explaining the existence of the Ramadan anomaly.

Financial inclusion is considered one of the strategic tools for sustainable development and one of the types of corporate social responsibility disclosures. This study aims to focus on the association between the disclosure of financial inclusion activities and Syrian banking companies’ performance.

Different regression models were suggested to examine the hypotheses leading to a better understanding of the relationship between financial inclusion and Syrian banking performance for the period 2005 to 2020 using the STATA 17.

The results showed a positive association between financial inclusion disclosure and Syrian bank performance, with low participation in financial inclusion activities (8%).

The study recommends that the Central Bank of Syria work on developing an index of financial inclusion for the Syrian environment, with the issuance of legislation and laws that obligate all listed banks to disclose their financial inclusion activities as a part of their social responsibility.

This study incorporates the relationship between the disclosure of financial inclusion activities and the performance of Syrian banking companies, which has been neglected by most studies on financial inclusion. Therefore, this study sheds light on this positive relationship, which could have important repercussions in reviving the deteriorating Syrian economy following the crisis it went through, which, in turn, led to Syria’s high inflation affecting the poor and vulnerable disproportionately.

This study examines the five-factor model of Fama and French (2015) on the French stock market by comparing it to the Fama and French (1993)’s base model. The new Fama and French five-factor model directed at capturing two new factors, profitability and investment in addition to the market, size and book to market premiums. The pricing models are tested using a time-series regression and the Fama and Macbeth (1973) methodology. The regularities in the factor’s behavior related to market conditions and to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe are also examined. The findings of Fama and French (2015) for the US market are confirmed on the Paris Bourse. The results show that both models help to explain some of the stock returns. However, the five-factor model is better since it has a marginal improvement over the widely used three-factor model of Fama and French (1993). In addition, the investment risk premium seems to be better priced in the French stock market than the profitability factor. The results are robust to the Fama and Macbeth (1973) methodology. Moreover, profitability and investment premiums are not affected by market conditions and the European sovereign debt crisis.