ABSTRACT This paper investigates trading volume before scheduled and unscheduled corporate announcements to explore how traders respond to private information. I show that cumulative trading volume decreases inversely to information asymmetry prior to scheduled announcements, while the opposite relation holds for volume after the announcement. In contrast, trading volume before unscheduled announcements increases dramatically and shows little relation to proxies for information asymmetry. I investigate the behavior of market makers and find that they act appropriately by increasing price sensitivity before all announcements, implying that they extract timing information from their order books.

This paper analyzes the effect of corporate governance on the payout policy when a firm has both agency problems and external financing constraints. We empirically test whether strong corporate governance would lead to higher payout to minimize agency problems (outcome hypothesis), or to lower payout to avoid costly external financing (substitute hypothesis). We find that firms with higher (lower) external financing constraints tend to decrease (increase) payout ratio with an improvement in their corporate governance. The results are consistent with our hypothesis that the relation between payout and corporate governance is reversed depending on the relative sizes of agency and external financing costs.

This paper proposes and tests the hypothesis that takeover vulnerability contributes to short-term price reversal by motivating investors to trade speculatively and also by making investors demand immediacy in their trades. That is, takeover vulnerability is hypothesized to amplify two channels of short-term price reversal, namely, overreaction and price concession. Using several different measures of takeover vulnerability, we find that takeover vulnerability is positively related to price reversal at daily frequencies. We also find that their positive relation is more pronounced when the stock is illiquid or when it is costly to arbitrage, a finding that is consistent with the notion that the observed price reversal is driven by the earlier price concession or overreaction. While unable to determine the exact relative importance between the two channels, we conduct further analysis showing that each channel plays an independent role. Finally, we find no relation between takeover vulnerability and price reversal at the portfolio level, which means that the price reversal observed in individual stock returns is driven by a firm-specific component.