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Although the value effect is comprehensively investigated in developed markets, the number of studies examining the Vietnamese stock market is limited. Hence, the first aim of this research is to provide empirical evidence regarding returns on value and growth stocks in Vietnam. The second aim is to explain abnormal returns on Vietnamese growth and value stocks using both risk-based and behavioral points of view.

From the risk-based explanation, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), Fama–French three- and five-factor models are estimated. From the behavioral explanation, to construct the mispricing factor, this paper relies on the method of Rhodes-Kropf et al. (2005), one of the most popular mispricing estimations in the financial literature with numerous citations (Jaffe et al., 2020).

While the CAPM and Fama–French multifactor models cannot capture returns on growth and value stocks, a three-factor model with the mispricing factor has done an excellent job in explaining their returns. Three out of four Fama–French mimic factors do not contain additional information on expected returns. Their risk premiums are also statistically insignificant according to the Fama–MacBeth second-stage regression. By contrast, both robustness tests prove the explanatory power of a three-factor model with mispricing. Taken together, mispricing plays an essential role in explaining returns on Vietnamese growth and value stocks, consistent with the behavioral point of view.

There are several value-enhancing aspects in the field of market finance. First, this paper contributes to the literature of value effect in emerging markets. While the evidence of value effect is obvious in numerous developed as well as international markets, both growth and value effects are discovered in Vietnam. Second, the explanatory power of Fama–French multifactor models is evaluated in the Vietnamese context. Finally, to the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first paper that incorporates the mispricing estimation of Rhodes-Kropf et al. (2005) into the asset pricing model in Vietnam.

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.

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.

This paper investigates the role of economic disagreement in the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. Economic disagreement is quantified with ex ante measures of cross-sectional dispersion in economic forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF), determining the degree of disagreement among professional forecasters over changes in economic fundamentals.

The authors introduce a broad index of economic disagreement based on the innovations in the cross-sectional dispersion of economic forecasts for output, inflation and unemployment so that the index is a shock measure that captures different aspects of disagreement over economic fundamentals and also reflects unexpected news or surprise about the state of the aggregate economy. After building the broad index of economic disagreement, the authors test out-of-sample performance of the index in predicting the cross-sectional variation in future stock returns.

Univariate portfolio analyses indicate that decile portfolios that are long in stocks with the lowest disagreement beta and short in stocks with the highest disagreement beta yield a risk-adjusted annual return of 7.2%. The results remain robust after controlling for well-known pricing effects. The results are consistent with a preference-based explanation that ambiguity-averse investors demand extra compensation to hold stocks with high disagreement risk and the investors are willing to pay high prices for stocks with large hedging benefits. The results also support the mispricing hypothesis that the high disagreement beta provides an indirect way to measure dispersed opinion and overpricing.

Most literature measures disagreement about individual stocks with the standard deviation of earnings forecasts made by financial analysts and examines the cross-sectional relation between this measure and individual stock returns. Unlike prior studies, the authors focus on disagreement about the economy instead of disagreement about earnings growth. The authors' argument is that disagreement about the economy is a major factor that would explain disagreement about stock fundamentals. The authors find that disagreement in economic forecasts does indeed have a significant impact on the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks.

In this study, we investigate what drives the MAX effect in the South Korean stock market. We find that the MAX effect is significant only for overpriced stocks categorized by the composite mispricing index. Our results suggest that investors' demand for the lottery and the arbitrage risk effect of MAX may overlap and negate each other. Furthermore, MAX itself has independent information apart from idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL), which assures that the high positive correlation between IVOL and MAX does not directly cause our empirical findings. Finally, by analyzing the direct trading behavior of investors, our results suggest that investors' buying pressure for lottery-like stocks is concentrated among overpriced stocks.

This paper aims to examine the extent to which sell-side analysts efficiently incorporate firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities into their earnings forecasts. In addition, this paper also investigate the CSR information efficiency of analysts vis-à-vis that of investors.

This paper measures CSR activities by using CSR strength and CSR concern scores from the Morgan Stanley Capital International Environmental, Social and Governance database. This paper uses analysts’ earnings forecast errors and dispersion as proxies for their information efficiency. To compare the CSR information efficiency of analysts to that of investors, this paper uses the Vt/Pt ratio, which is the equity value estimates inferred from analysts’ earnings forecasts (a proxy for analysts’ CSR information efficiency) to the stock price of the focal company (a proxy for investors’ CSR information efficiency).

The regression analysis indicates that analysts’ earnings forecasts are optimistically biased and more dispersed for firms with positive CSR activities. The paper also finds that analysts’ forecasts are more optimistically biased than investors in interpreting CSR activities.

The lack of standardized protocols in CSR reporting and activities has raised the risk of mispricing by analysts, threatening the stability of sustainable investments. This paper suggests that regulators and standard-setters should establish a uniform framework governing firms’ CSR activities, along with their reporting and measurement, to ensure more consistent and reliable evaluations of CSR practices.

Analysts’ mispricing of CSR activities may distort sustainable investing, as it can overly focus on the positive impacts of stakeholder theory, overlooking agency theory’s warnings about managerial self-interest. Investors need to assess CSR efforts with a dual perspective, acknowledging their societal value but also examining their alignment with shareholder interests.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to assess the efficiency of analysts versus investors in processing CSR information amidst growing sustainable investment interests. Furthermore, building on Dhaliwal et al. (2012), which found that voluntary CSR disclosures correlate with more accurate analyst forecasts, this research provides fresh perspectives on the evolving nature of how analysts assimilate CSR information over time.

This paper jointly examines how firm size and idiosyncratic risk impact momentum returns.

Using regression analysis, the authors investigate how firm size and idiosyncratic risk impact price momentum. The authors review firm price data in 25 country markets in the Thomson Financial Datastream database from 1979 to 2009.

This study’s findings suggest price momentum is more significant among stocks with smaller size and higher idiosyncratic risk. The authors find that winner and loser portfolios have significantly smaller size and higher idiosyncratic risk than portfolios in the middle quintiles.

This study’s results are consistent with the notion that firm size matters in price momentum and mispricing is greatest for small firms because of the greater risk potential to arbitrageurs. In addition, this finding that firms with higher idiosyncratic risk have greater price momentum supports the idea that investors underreact to firm-specific information.

This work finds evidence that investors underreact to firm-specific information. As such, these findings are of particular interest for investors looking to exploit opportunities for abnormal returns through price momentum trading.

This paper jointly examines the effects of firm size and idiosyncratic risk on momentum returns. This investigation considers these effects in the global markets. This work adds to the research base by illustrating that both winner and loser portfolios have significantly smaller size and higher idiosyncratic risk than portfolios in the middle quintiles. Also unique to this study, the authors capture the time-variation of expected IdioRisk and the asymmetric effects of volatility by using an exponential general autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (EGARCH) model to calculate conditional idiosyncratic risk.

This study focuses on an emerging market, China, and investigates the effects of corporate research and development (R&D) spending and subsidies on stock market reactions to seasoned equity offering (SEO) announcements.

The study uses a sample of SEOs announced over the period of 2003–2018 in the Chinese A-share market. The cumulative abnormal stock returns (CARs) are adopted to measure the stock market response to SEOs. The R&D spending-to-sales ratio (R&D subsidies) in 2 years before SEO announcements is used to measure the pre-SEO R&D spending (R&D subsidies). The instrumental variable (IV) regression method is applied to address the endogeneity problem in the robustness test.

This study demonstrates that firms with high R&D spending suffer stock overpricing and experience a negative market reaction when they announce SEOs, but R&D subsidies alleviate stock overpricing and mitigate the negative relationship between R&D spending and SEO market reactions.

Although the prior studies have demonstrated that information asymmetry, which causes stock overpricing, explains negative stock market reactions to SEOs, it is unclear if a certain factor that causes information asymmetry affects SEO market reactions. This study fills this gap and focuses on R&D spending, demonstrating that R&D spending is negatively related to SEO performance.

This article analyses the recent inverse transition from goodwill impairment to goodwill amortisation implemented in Spain in 2016. The authors contribute to the existing literature by describing their differing impact over goodwill and impairment figures and testing the impact of goodwill on balances over stock prices.

First, using a database with all Spanish non-financial firms with positive goodwill on their balance sheets, the authors describe the impact of the regulatory change over goodwill and impairment figures. Second, focussing on listed firms only, the authors study the impact of financial reporting of goodwill and impairment on stock prices.

Average goodwill per company and the share of goodwill over total assets significantly reduced after 2016, but the results cannot be easily extrapolated to listed firms due to lack of data. When testing the impact of potentially inflated goodwill balances on prices, the authors find that investors kept overvaluing firms with inflated goodwill balances also with the amortisation method.

The lack of data for listed firms with goodwill in Spain makes it difficult to obtain statistically sound evidence, the results could be biased by the cultural traits of the country and related to the intensity of enforcement and monitoring.

This might suggest that the effects of the impairment method linger, so the authors conform to the interpretation that the systematic amortisation paired with a periodic impairment test may lead to accounting that better reflects the underlying economics of goodwill.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, there are no recent articles that analyse this new “turn-around” requiring again the systematic amortisation of goodwill.

This study proposes a framework based on salience theory and shows that focusing on one type of risk (idiosyncratic or systemic) can explain overpricing of securities ex ante, and resales at low prices during crisis periods.

The author consider an overlapping generations (OLG) model where each generation lives for two periods and there is no population growth. Agents (investors) start their lives with an endowment W > 0 and have mean-variance utility. They invest their endowment when young and consume when old. Each period, the young investors optimally choose their portfolio from different risky assets acquired from the old generation, all assumed to be in fixed supply.

The author show that investor salience bias can explain excess volatility of asset prices and the resulting fire-sales in periods of financial turmoil. A change in salience – from one component (idiosyncratic) to the other (systemic) – will generate excess volatility. Interestingly, higher risk aversion generally exacerbates the excess volatility of prices. Moreover, the model predicts that if a big systemic shock hits the financial system, due to salience bias the price of systemic assets falls sharply. This relates to the observed fire-sales of assets during the global financial crisis.

The proposed model and results suggest that there may be a scope for intervention in financial markets during turbulences. In terms of ex ante policies the study suggests that investors and regulator should use better risk assessment technologies.

This is the first study constructing a tractable model based on the argument that investor salience may exacerbate the excess volatility of prices during financial downturns. The author relate salience to two types of risk; idiosyncratic and systemic and assume that investors' risk perception is biased towards the type of risk that is currently salient based on prior beliefs or past data. The author show that the diversification fallacy of the precrisis period, where seemingly safe assets were overpriced, can be explained by agents overweighing idiosyncratic risk and ignoring systemic risk.