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This study examines the cross‐autocorrelation of size‐based portfolio returns in a sample of 15 major European markets using daily data from January 1990 through December 1999. Previous studies have primarily used U.S. data. This study extends previous research by considering results in multiple European exchanges. We examine whether a difference in size‐based portfolios exists by testing cross‐autocorrelation, granger‐causality, and asymmetric responses in the European markets. The results confirm that large stock portfolio returns lead small stock portfolio returns in most European countries, and that cross‐autocorrelation is present both within and between European financial markets.

We examine explicitly priced financial distress risk in post-1990 equity markets. We add a financial distress risk factor to Fama and French's (1993) three-factor model, based on Griffin and Lemmon's (2002) findings that financial distress is not fully captured by the book-to-market factor. We test three-factor and four-factor capital asset pricing models using both annual buy-and-hold analysis and monthly time series analysis across portfolios adjusted for common book-to-market, size, and financial distress factors. We find empirical support for an Ohlson (1980) O-score-based financial distress risk four-factor asset pricing model in the U.S. and Japanese markets.

The purpose of this paper is to compare recent performance of small firms with that of large firms in developed and emerging stock markets.

T‐tests as well as Wilcoxon Signed Rank test statistics are utilized to test the differences in returns between stock indices. Additionally, ANOVA and median test statistics were conducted to test differences in size premiums over years. Finally, t‐tests as well as Mann‐Whitney U test statistics were conducted to examine the differences in size premiums by market conditions and January over non‐January months.

It was found that small firms did not generate significantly different returns than large firms in recent years. More specifically, size premiums were not sensitive to market conditions and were not significantly higher in January over non‐January months. These results indicate stock markets no longer exhibit a size effect or a reverse size effect.

The paper contributes to the finance literature by examining the size effect as well as the reverse size effect in developed and emerging stock markets on recent data.

Market efficiency suggests that price of the security must reflect its intrinsic value by impounding all the available and accessible information. Asset pricing in capital markets has been an exceptionally dynamic area of scholarly research and is considered as a barometer for assessing market efficiency. This phenomenon was very well explained by several market pricing models and theories over the last few decades. However, several anomalies, which cannot be explained by the traditional asset pricing models due to seasonal and psychological factors, were observed historically. The same has been studied by several researchers over the years and is well captured in the literature pertaining to market asset pricing. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the research studies related to a few asset pricing anomalies, collectively referred to as “calendar anomalies”, such as – day-of-the-week, turn-of-the-month, turn-of-the-year and the holiday effects. In this pursuit, a thorough survey of literature in this area, published over the last 80 years (from 1934 to 2016) across 24 prominent journals, has been made and presented in a comprehensive, structured and chronologically arranged major findings and learnings. This literature survey reveals that the existing literature do provide a great depth of understanding around these calendar anomalies often with reference to specific markets, the size of the firm and investor type. The paper also highlights a few aspects where the existing literature is silent or provides little support leaving a gap that needs to be addressed with further research in this area.

The goal of the study requires a comprehensive review of the past literature related to calendar anomalies. As a consequence, to identify papers which sufficiently represent the area of study, the authors examined the full text of articles within EBSCOHost, Elsevier-Science direct, Emerald insight and JSTOR databases with calendar anomalies related keywords for articles published since inception. Further, each article was classified based on the anomaly discussed and the factors used to sub-categorize the anomaly. Once all the identified fields were populated, we passed through another article by constantly updating the master list till all the 99 articles were populated.

It is also important to understand at this juncture that most of the papers surveyed discuss the persistence of the asset pricing anomalies with reference to the developed markets with a very few offering evidences from emerging markets. Thus leaving a huge scope for further research to study the persistence of asset pricing anomalies, the degree and direction of the effect on asset pricing among emerging markets such as India, Russia, Brazil vis-a-vis the developed markets. Further, regardless of the markets with reference to which the study is conducted, the research so far appears to have laid focus only on the overall market returns derived from aggregate market indices to explain the asset pricing anomalies. Thus leaving enough scope for further research to study and understand the persistence of these anomalies with reference to various strategic, thematic and sectoral indices in various markets (developed, emerging and underdeveloped countries) across different time periods. It will be also interesting to understand how, some or all of, these established asset pricing anomalies behave over a certain time period when markets move across the efficiency maturity model (from weak form to semi-strong to strong form of efficiency).

The main purpose of the study entails a detailed review of all the past literature pertinent to the calendar anomalies. In order to explore the prior literature that sufficiently captures the research area, various renowned databases were examined with keywords related to the calendar anomalies under scope of current study. Furthermore, based on the finalized articles, a comprehensive summary table was populated and provided in the Appendix which gives a snapshot of all the articles under the current assessment. This helps the readers of the article to directly relate the findings of each article with its background information.

This study investigates whether cyclical turning points in the U.S. and U.K. stock markets are unevenly distributed over the year, that is, whether they are more likely to occur during certain months of the year. In examining this form of periodic seasonality, a Markov switching‐model is applied to U.S. and U.K. stock market chronologies of monthly peak and trough dates for the periods May 1835 through March 2000 and May 1836 through September 2000, respectively. In order to provide some evidence on robustness with respect to the sample data, results are obtained for the entire sample periods as well as for various sub‐. For both markets, the evidence indicates that while the probability of moving from an expansion to a contraction does not depend on the month of the year, the probability of switching from a contraction is greater for some months. Additionally, the durations of contractions, but not expansions, are dependent on the month of the year in which they begin.

This study explores the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak and its following lockdown on daily stock returns in Vietnam, a fast-growing emerging market that successfully revived after the pandemic lockdown.

This study uses panel-data regression models to evaluate the influence of the daily increase in the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases during pre-lockdown and lockdown on daily stock returns of 723 listed firms in Vietnam from 30 January to 30 May 2020.

The study confirms the adverse impact of the daily increasing number of COVID-19 cases on stock returns in Vietnam. The study also discloses that the Vietnam stock market before and during the nationwide lockdown performed in opposing ways. Though COVID-19 pre-lockdown had a significant, negative impact on Vietnam's stock returns, the lockdown period had a significant, positive influence on stock performance of the entire market and the different business sectors in Vietnam. The financial sector was hardest hit on the Vietnam stock market during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The study indicates investors' confidence and trust in the Vietnam government's decisions to combat COVID-19 and favorable stocks prices were the main reasons that the Vietnam stock market rebounded during and after lockdown.

This is the first study to examine the impact of COVID-19 during the pre-lockdown and lockdown periods on stock performance in Vietnam, a rapidly developing economy that was successful in controlling the pandemic with a rejuvenated stock market after lockdown.

A long history of literature has considered the role of information risk in determining the cost of equity. The question that has remained unanswered is whether information risk plays any systematic role in determining the cost of equity. One of the fundamental decisions that every business needs to make is to assess where to invest its funds and to re-evaluate, at regular intervals, the quality of its existing investments. The cost of capital is the most important yardstick to evaluate such decisions. Greater information is associated with the lower cost of capital via mitigating transaction costs and/or reducing estimation risk and stock returns. This study aims to investigate the impact of information risk on the cost of equity and corporate stock returns.

The research sample consists of 960 firm-year observations for companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange from 2009 to 2018. The research hypotheses were tested using multivariate regression models based on panel data.

The results reveal that information risk has a significant positive impact on the firm’s cost of equity. However, the impact of information risk on stock returns is not statistically significant.

To the best of the knowledge, the current study is almost the first of its kind in the Iranian literature which investigates the subject matter; therefore, the findings of the study not only extend the extant theoretical literature concerning the information risk in developing countries including the emerging capital market of Iran but also help investors, capital market regulators and accounting standard setters to make timely decisions.

Schedule UTP requires that firms disclose to the IRS the uncertain tax positions that comprise the federal portion of the tax reserve disclosed on their financial statements. To investigate whether Schedule UTP has been an effective audit tool to the IRS, we use financial statement disclosures of reductions in reserves due to a lapse in the statute of limitations (Lapse). We find that the probability of a Lapse is 3.4 percent lower after Schedule UTP. However, this result is driven by domestic firms; we do not find evidence that Schedule UTP has been effective in the audit of multinational firms.

Periods of financial distress represent an episode during the firm’s life that requires an effective governance structure in the interests of shareholders. Changes in corporate governance structure are examined as firms approach and emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The purpose of this paper is to posit that firms alter their governance toward a more effective framework during restructuring, leading to emergence as a better performing firm.

The data set includes large firms that filed for bankruptcy between 1998 and 2013. Financial and governance characteristics prior to filing are compared to traits following emergence. The likelihood of emerging from bankruptcy is tested based on governance characteristics prior to filing and the change in these characteristics during bankruptcy.

The results show that firms use the bankruptcy process to significantly change their governance characteristics. These changes include smaller boards, greater board independence, unitary boards, the separation of the CEO and chairman positions, and changes in the ownership structure. Despite these changes, performance following emergence does not improve, and the changes in governance structure do not alter the likelihood that the firm will emerge.

This study, unlike previous studies, takes a broad look at governance characteristics for firms before and after bankruptcy. The findings imply that “better” governance, as defined in the literature, is not necessarily the pathway to better performance as many posit. The factors that influence the likelihood of emerging from bankruptcy and post-emergence performance require further study.

Daniel and Titman (1997) contend that the Fama‐French three‐factor model’s ability to explain cross‐sectional variation in expected returns is a result of characteristics that firms have in common rather than any risk‐based explanation. The primary aim of the current paper is to provide out‐of‐sample tests of the characteristics versus risk factor argument. The main focus of our tests is to examine the intercept terms in Fama‐French regressions, wherein test portfolios are formed by a three‐way sorting procedure on book‐to‐market, size and factor loadings. Our main test focuses on ‘characteristic‐balanced’ portfolio returns of high minus low factor loading portfolios, for different size and book‐to‐market groups. The Fama‐French model predicts that these regression intercepts should be zero while the characteristics model predicts that they should be negative. Generally, despite the short sample period employed, our findings support a risk‐factor interpretation as opposed to a characteristics interpretation. This is particularly so for the HML loading‐based test portfolios. More specifically, we find that: the majority of test portfolios tend to reveal higher returns for higher loadings (while controlling for book‐to‐market and size characteristics); the majority of the Fama‐French regression intercepts are statistically insignificant; for the characteristic‐balanced portfolios, very few of the Fama‐French regression intercepts are significant.