Knowledge that Transforms

The trading mechanism for equities on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) stands in sharp contrast to the primary mechanisms used to trade stocks in the United States. In the United States, exchange-designated specialists have affirmative obligations to provide continuous liquidity to the market. Specialists offer simultaneous and tight quotes to both buy and sell and supply sufficient liquidity to limit the magnitude of price changes between consecutive transactions. In contradistinction, the TSE has no exchange-designated liquidity suppliers. Instead, liquidity is provided through a public limit order book, and liquidity is organized through restrictions on maximum price changes between trades that serve to slow down trading. In this article, we examine the efficacy of the TSE's trading mechanisms at providing liquidity. Our analysis is based on a complete record of transactions and best-bid and best-offer quotes for most stocks in the First Section of the TSE over a period of 26 months. We study the size of the bid-ask spread and its cross-sectional and intertemporal stability; intertemporal patterns in returns, volatility, volume, trade size, and the frequency of trades; and market depth based on the response of quotes to trades and the frequency of trading halts and warning quotes.

This article derives testable restrictions on equilibrium asset prices when investors have the option to time the realization of their capital gains and losses for tax purposes. The tax-timing option alters both the magnitude and timing of equity returns relative to those in a tax-free model. The tax-induced restrictions are empirically examined, and the tax rates and preference parameters are estimated. While the tax-free model can be rejected in favor of the tax-based model as the specified alternative, the tax-based model is still unable to adequately explain cross-sectional differences in asset returns. Copyright 1994 by American Finance Association.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

This paper studies a nonexpected utility, general equilibrium asset pricing model in which market fundamentals follow a bivariate Markov switching process. The results show that nonexpected utility is capable of exactly matching the means of the risk-free rate and the risk premium. Asymmetric market fundamentals are capable of generating a negative sample correlation between the risk-free rate and the risk premium. Moreover an equilibrium asset pricing model endowed with asymmetric market fundamentals is consistent with all five first and second moments of the risk-free rate and the risk premium in the U.S. data.

This article uses a sample of 120 unsuccessful management buyouts (MBOs) to test whether operational improvements following successful MBOs are a result of organizational changes or private information. The findings are consistent with the organizational changes hypothesis. Firms with an unsuccessful MBO had no increase in operating performance following the buyout attempt. In addition, the cumulative abnormal stock return from before the attempted buyout until two years after the attempt is insignificantly different from 0 percent. I also find that management turnover following an unsuccessful MBO is significantly higher than normal.