Daily returns are used to examine how mutual funds actively alter the risk of their portfolios in response to past performance. Compared to monthly data, daily returns produce much more efficient estimates of fund volatility, which give vastly different inferences about the behavior of fund managers. In particular, monthly results consistent with under-performers increasing their risk relative to better performing funds disappear with daily data. The differences in the monthly and daily results arise from biases in the monthly volatility estimates attributable to daily return autocorrelation.

The leading explanation for the post-issue long-run stock return underperformace of seasoned equity offering firms is that investors have optimistic expectations regarding future earnings and the underperformance occures as these expectations are corrected over time. To directly test this hypothessis, we examine investors' reaction to quarterly earnings announcements over a five-year period following the offering for a large sample of seasoned equity issuing firms. In general, our evidence suggests that investorsare not disappointed by earnings announcements that follow seasoned equity offerings. This result is not sensitive to widening the windown over which earnings announcement returns are computed. This result also holds true for subsets of equity issuing firms. The choice fo these three subsets is predicated by extant evidence that these firms are likely to convey relatively more unfavorable information throung their earnings announcements. Overall, our findings are inconsistent with the optimistic expectations hypotgesis.

David M. Reeb, Sattar A. Mansi, John M. Allee, Firm Internationalization and the Cost of Debt Financing: Evidence from Non-Provisional Publicly Traded Debt, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 395-414

In this paper, we determine whether each bid (ask) quote reflects the trading interest of the specialist, limit order traders, or both for a sample of NYSE stocks in 1991. We then compare Nasdaq spreads with NYSE spreads that reflect the trading interest of the specialist. Our empirical results show that the average Nasdaq spread is significantly larger than the average NYSE specialist spread. We find that, on average, 49% of the difference between Nasdaq and specialist spreads is due to the differential use of even-eighth quotes between Nasdaq dealers and NYSE specialists. We also find that the NYSE specialist spread is significantly larger than the limit order spread, although NYSE specialists and limit order traders are similiar in their use of even-eighth quotes.