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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.

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.

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 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 paper aims to estimate a statistical model of the country risk determination as represented by the country price earnings ratio (PE) to identify potentially mispriced countries. It uses the gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate and a dummy indicator for market-related events (i.e. financial crises), both approximating the business cycle. The model is used to compare a major Asian country’s (i.e. Japan) risk with Western countries’ risk.

The model used finance variables such as the systemic, non-diversifiable, risk and foreign direct investments to characterize any country risk. A random effects model with panel data estimated the effects of macroeconomic and financial variables on PE. The simultaneity problem was checked using two stage least squares and some lagged independent variables.

The results explained to investors the country risk contributing factors: PE was positively correlated with variables that may increase dividends and market risk premia similar to GDP growth rates and total risk and negatively correlated with variables that increase market risk, namely, nominal risk-free interest rates and financial crises. Japan’s PE seemed to exceed most of the Western countries considered here, implying lower risks, lower interest rates and higher growth in the major Asian country Japan.

This paper focuses on the effectiveness of country risk measures in predicting periods of intense instability, similar to financial crises. This study contributes a model to measure market risk premium, using PE (or inversely, the earnings yield) as a proxy variable. Investors can use this risk measure in picking less risky stocks to include in their portfolio, calling for liberalizing Asian countries’ financial markets to improve their stock market capitalization.

The author examines the impact these efficient factors have on factor model comparison tests in US returns using the Bayesian model scan approach of Chib et al. (2020), and Chib et al.(2022).

Ehsani and Linnainmaa (2022) show that time-series efficient investment factors in US stock returns span and earn 40% higher Sharpe ratios than the original factors.

The author shows that the optimal asset pricing model is an eight-factor model which contains efficient versions of the market factor, value factor (HML) and long-horizon behavioral factor (FIN). The findings show that efficient factors enhance the performance of US factor model performance. The top performing asset pricing model does not change in recent data.

The author is the only one to examine if the efficient factors developed by Ehsani and Linnainmaa (2022) have an impact on model comparison tests in US stock returns.

National cultures significantly explain cross-country differences in the relation between asset growth and stock returns. Motivated by the notion that managers in individualistic and low uncertainty-avoiding cultures have a higher tendency to overinvest, this study aims to show that the negative relation between asset growth and stock returns is stronger in countries with such cultural features. Once the researchers control for cultural dimensions, proxies associated with the q-theory, limits-to-arbitrage, corporate governance, investor protection and accounting quality provide no incremental power for the relation between asset growth and stock returns across countries. Evidence of this study highlights the importance of the overinvestment hypothesis in explaining the asset growth anomaly around the world.

This study examines whether the Russia–Ukraine war affects herding behavior in the Moscow Exchange.

The authors employ the daily stock closing prices of 40 firms, which constitute the MOEX Russia Index from June 16, 2021, to November 30, 2022. The period before the invasion ranges from June 16, 2021, to February 23, 2022, while the post-invasion period runs from February 24, 2022, to November 30, 2022.

The findings suggest that the Russia–Ukraine war led to the formation of herding behavior among investors in Moscow Exchange. However, this herding behavior seems to be prevalent only during market downturns.

The results are important for policymakers and fund managers since they help them understand behavior patterns of investors during periods of war. Given the devastating effect of herd behavior on market stability, policymakers should implement a strategy to avoid this behavior. The formation of herding behavior during the Russia–Ukraine war indicates that uncertainty and fear caused by Western sanctions lead investors to imitate others which, in turn, could lead to equity mispricing. Thus, firm managers should take into account this evidence in equity issuance decisions in order to time the market. The findings raise questions about the validity of the efficient market hypothesis during the periods of war.

This study represents the first attempt to explore whether the Russia–Ukraine conflict contributes to the appearance of herding behavior among investors on Moscow Exchange.