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This paper aims to investigate the impact of day trading on market quality on the Taiwan stock market with the implementation of a unique policy change. This paper examines 396 listed stocks from June 2015 to October 2016, a period when the stock market in Taiwan officially approved selected stocks for day trading for all investors. Within the sample period, the empirical findings show that day trading increases the bid–ask spread, price depth and stock volatility, indicating that day trading activities not only cause higher transaction costs and trading risk but also raise the market’s ability to absorb price impact. This paper considers two-stage regression and tests the exogenous shock because of further relaxation for day trading to deal with the possible endogenous problem and the main findings remain consistent. Since early 2014, the Taiwan stock market has been experiencing a distinct growth in trading volume after unwinding the day trading; however, the results show that the impacts of stock day trading on market quality are not all positive.

This study analyzes the impact of the information environment (IE) and credit default swap (CDS) transaction costs on information transmission between the stock and CDS markets. Using the daily regression analysis on the Korean firm’s stock and CDS data from 2004 to 2023, the results show that companies with superior IE in the stock market exhibit a larger and more sensitive total information flow from the stock market to the CDS market. Companies with lower transaction costs in the CDS market demonstrate faster information flow. In the case of companies with superior IE, fundamental information is reflected in stock prices with high weight and thus the CDS spreads change reflecting information about stock prices. According to this study’s findings, the primary factor influencing the information flow from the stock market to the CDS market is the information environment of the company in the stock market, rather than transaction costs in the CDS market.

The National Pension Service (NPS) of Korea suddenly announced that they would suspend their stock lending business from October 22, 2018. Using this ideal setting, the authors investigate the effects of this suspension on market quality and short-selling activities. The authors find that stock return does not increase after the suspension of stock lending for both the KOSPI and KOSDAQ markets. However, the returns of stocks with NPS ownership decline less than those without NPS ownership. The authors also find that the institutional and foreign investors' short sales did not increase in both markets after the lending business suspension by the NPS. In addition, the effect of suspension of stock lending on market quality is mixed, so the authors cannot conclude that market quality has improved. Overall, the authors’ results indicate that the stock market, especially for short-sales activity, has not been affected by the suspension of the stock lending service by the NPS.

This paper aims to examine the extent of price clustering in a selection of Islamic stocks listed in Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan and also investigates the determinants of the phenomenon at the firm level.

The author test the uniformity of price distribution in the selected securities. Then, the determinants of price clustering were investigated through multivariate analysis based on a binary logistic regression model. Following the arguments of Narayan et al. (2011), who emphasize the importance of considering firm heterogeneity when studying the phenomenon, the author conducts the empirical study at the firm level.

The evidence indicates that Islamic stocks show a mild level of price clustering. Only half of the stocks under analysis rejected the uniformity test in the distribution of prices. In these cases, investors exhibited a preference for prices ending at zero and five. The evidence does not confirm the cultural clustering theories. Price clustering is found to be positively associated with price level and relative bid-ask spread. Overall, the negotiation hypothesis, which predicts that investors prefer round prices to minimize the costs associated with negotiations, best explains most of our results.

The existence of price clustering is difficult to reconcile with the prediction of the efficient market hypothesis that prices should follow a random walk. Moreover, the evidence indicates that Muslim investors share a preference for round prices in some settings, under the assumption that Islamic stocks are mostly traded by Muslim investors.

To the author’s best knowledge, this is the first study to address the subject of price clustering in Islamic stocks.

This study examines the effect of the informational content of local credit rating announcements in emerging markets on the liquidity of their bond markets. This study analyses the liquidity of bonds in various emerging bond markets using a sample of nine countries: Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Turkey, Hong Kong and Greece. The sample includes daily data on sovereign bonds that go from July 2009 to July 2017. The main focus is on the period before and after the sovereign debt crisis. This study notes that the bond liquidity is affected due to the sign of the rating granted by the rating agencies for each country.

This study aims to question the sources of liquidity problem of sovereign bonds issued by the emerging countries. The study’s database consists of daily data of all nine emerging countries for the period from July 2009 to July 2017. Panel data were collected from the Datastream database.

This study first directly tests the information content of bond ratings announcements and their effect on bond market liquidity. Next, the impact of rating changes on sovereign bond liquidity around the rating announcements is studied. Rating changes can affect sovereign bond's price, trading and liquidity around the announcement date. In particular the rating changes that move the bonds out of the investment grade category can elicit selling pressure or even fire sale of the fallen angels.

This research aims to present data on the prices of sovereign bonds that react to changes in credit rating by studying the price movements around the announcement of changes in credit rating. The literature is very rich in studies on credit rating changes on stocks and corporate bonds, but this study is perhaps the first attempt on sovereign bonds.

This study examines the bid/ask spread and its components in the KOSPI200 options market under the framework of the cross-market model, which utilizes the order flow information of both KOSPI200 futures and options markets. We also compare the results by the single-market model (MRR model; Madhavan et al., 1997) and by the cross-market model (Ryu (2011)’s extension). This comparison suggests that the cross-market approach can mitigate the underestimation of the permanent spread component of OTM options and the overestimation of the component of ITM options, which are often detected when we directly apply the single market model into the KOSPI200 options market where the ITM options are relatively illiquid while the OTM options are extremely liquid. We also find that the effect of the order flow information of the futures market on the option spread and its permanent spread component will vary depending on the option moneyness and the intraday time period. This implies that the order flow of the futures market has more significant effects if the degree of informed trading is relatively high.

This study examines the impacts of the KTB futures options, newly introduced at the Korea Futures Exchange (KOFEX) on May, 2002, on the intraday volatility and liquidity of the KTB futures markets for the period from January 17, 2002, to August 30, 2002. The results show that the volatility of the KTB futures appears to have increased since the inception of the KTB futures options. However, the increase in volatility largely disappears after controlling for the effects of volume, time-to-maturity, day-of-the-week, and bid-ask bounce. There is some mixed evidence regarding the impact on the liquidity of the KTB futures markets, in the sense that the trading volume has increased significantly whereas the bid-ask spreads have widened too. The KTB futures price changes are more likely to lead the price changes of the KTB futures options by about 15 minutes, which is probably due to the infrequent trading problem on the part of the KTB futures options. Finally, though infrequently traded, the put-futures parity condition is rarely violated, and thus is difficult to be exploited for arbitrage transactions, indicating that the two markets are closely linked each other.

This study examines the lead-lag relationship between the stock market and CDS market in Korea using the firm-level data during 2006-2009. Our main findings can be summarized as follows. First, our empirical finding shows that stock returns Granger cause CDS spread changes for a larger number of firms than vice versa. Second, the sub-sample analysis reveals that while the stock market leads the CDS market in each sub-sample, the lead-lag relationship is more pronounced in the post-crisis period. Finally, our main findings remain the same even in the presence of controlling variables such as equity volatilities, absolute bid-ask spreads, and CDS premium on foreign exchange stabilization bonds issued by Korean government. In sum, consistent with the U. S. and U. K. evidence, it appears that the stock market leads the CDS market in Korea.

Negative disclosure tone in 10-K annual reports has economic consequences, yet relatively little is known about how it is generated. Boards of directors play an important governance role with respect to mandatory disclosures and personally sign off on Form 10-K, leading us to expect directors to influence financial reporting narratives. This study investigates whether the negative tone of firms' narrative annual report disclosures is associated with the human and social capital of its board of directors.

Multivariate regression analyses of negative disclosure tone (Loughran and McDonald, 2011) on board members' average age, gender, education, financial expertise and turnover is performed. A host of supplemental tests to corroborate our primary analysis, including using Sarbanes-Oxley's financial expert mandate as an exogenous shock to board composition, impact threshold for a confounding variable, placebo analysis, portfolio tests of more and less negative disclosing firms and portfolio tests of “loud” versus “quiet” boards are conducted.

Evidence that directors' gender, education, financial expertise and board turnover are associated with more negative disclosure tone, while directors' age is associated with less negative disclosure tone is found. The study also looked within the board to differentiate whether these findings are driven by characteristics of inside directors or outside directors serving on the audit committee, or both, as these are the specific groups of directors we would expect to play a role in disclosure. It was found that negative disclosure tone is associated with a lower bid-ask spread, so this study interpreted more negative tone as containing more descriptive information.

This study helps decode the “black box” of annual report disclosure tone, which Loughran and McDonald (2011) show has important economic implications. The results help inform stakeholders such as policymakers, executives and capital market participants as to how board member traits are associated with disclosure. The findings are particularly important as this study bears witness to the increasing prominence of gender/diversity mandates (e.g. Israel, Norway, California) and financial expertise mandates (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley).

The purpose of this paper is to test an implication of the pecking order theory to explain capital structure decisions among Chinese listed companies during the 2005-2007 NTS Reform transition period.

The authors utilize direct proxies for information asymmetry based on microstructure models including Probability of the arrival of informed trades (PIN), Adverse selection component of the bid-ask spread (λ), Illiquidity ratio (ILLIQ) and liquidity ratio, and Information asymmetry index (InfoAsy) to examine their relation with firms’ debt financing.

Consistent with the prediction of Pecking Order Theory, the authors find that companies for which stock investors are challenged with more severe informational disadvantages are associated with higher degree of leverage use.

The study provides a more direct test on the positive relation between information asymmetry and financial leverage of Chinese firms. In contrast to previous findings by Chen (2004), the results suggest that capital structure choices among Chinese firms progressively conform to conventional finance theories (e.g. Pecking Order Theory) with the decline of non-tradable shares.