We develop a model to examine the impact of international cross-listing on domestic market liquidity and trading volume to determine when domestic market development is likely to follow. Greater information transparency between markets increases domestic market liquidity and volume, resulting in market development. Conversely, post-listing order flow migration away from the domestic market reduces its liquidity and volume, resulting in retardation. The net impact is positive and greater when market professionals acquire rather than reveal information, for smaller previously restricted markets, and for cross-listings in larger more transparent markets that have a greater potential to expand the shareholder base.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D44, D82, F36, G15.

This paper proposes and implements a security design framework to assess why corporate managers issue convertible debt. We examine three theories that make predictions about the design of convertible debt. Our results suggest that some issuers design convertible debt to mitigate asset substitution problems, while others design it to reduce adverse selection problems. We also find that issuers vary convertible debt security design over the business cycle in response to time variation in asset substitution and adverse selection problems. Overall, the results indicate that corporate managers actively alter convertible debt security design to mitigate costly external finance problems. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: G32

We study the effects of changes in bid–ask spreads on the prices and trading volumes of stocks that move from Nasdaq to the NYSE or Amex and stocks that move from Amex to Nasdaq. When stocks move from Nasdaq to an exchange, their spreads typically decrease, but the reduction in spreads is larger when Nasdaq market makers avoid odd-eighth quotes. When stocks move from Amex to Nasdaq, their spreads typically increase, but again, the increase is larger when Nasdaq market makers avoid odd eighths. We use this data to isolate the effects of transaction costs on trading volume and expected returns. We find that higher transaction costs significantly reduce trading volume, but do not have a significant effect on prices.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: G10, G14.

In rational, efficiently functioning and complete markets, returns on derivative and underlying securities should be perfectly contemporaneously correlated. Due to market imperfections, one of these markets may reflect information faster. The use of high-frequency data and the choice for a small unit time interval to measure these lead-lag relations comes at the cost of some or many missing observations, causing traditional estimators to either under- or overestimate covariances and correlations. We use a new estimator to estimate lead-lag relationships between the cash AEX index, options and futures. We find that futures returns lead both options and cash index returns by approximately 10 minutes. The relationship between options and the cash market is not completely unidirectional.

This paper analyzes the effect of uncertainty about the mean return on the risky asset on the portfolio decisions of an investor who has a long investment horizon. Building on the earlier work of Detemple (1986), Dothan and Feldman (1986), and Gennotte (1986), it is shown that the possibility of future learning about the mean return on the risky asset induces the investor to take a larger or smaller position in the risky asset than she would if there were no learning, the direction of the effect depending on whether the investor is more or less risk tolerant than the logarithmic investor whose portfolio decisions are unaffected by the possibility of future learning. Numerical calculations show that uncertainty about the mean return on the market portfolio has a significant effect on the portfolio decision of an investor with a 20 year horizon if her assessment of the market risk premium is based solely on the Ibbotson and Sinquefield (1995) data

We consider the bankruptcy law and workout practices in the United States and model bankruptcy as a strategic decision. We analyze a firm's choice between liquidation under Chapter 7, renegotiation of the debt contract in a workout, and reorganization under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code. Our premise is that a financially distressed firm chooses its action in order to minimize the loss in value caused by the well-known over- and under-investment problems. We show that the firm initiates a workout when it faces under-investment, and commences Chapter 11 when it faces over-investment. Some of the results are: (i) in default, total firm value and equity value increase upon the announcement of a workout and decrease upon the announcement of Chapter 11; (ii) firms with shorter maturity of debt are more likely to reorganize in a workout; (iii) among the firms that renegotiate their debt contract, the proportion of firms entering Chapter 11 is higher for firms in mature industries than for firms in growth industries.

This paper uses a large sample containing the complete return histories of 2300UK openended mutual funds over a 23-year period to measure fund performance. We find some evidence of underperformance on a risk-adjusted basis by the average fund manager, persistenceof performance and the existence of a substantial survivor bias. Similar findings have been reported for US equity mutual funds. New findings not previously documented for other markets include evidence that mutual fund performance varies substantially across different asset categories, especially foreign asset categories. We also identify some new patterns in performance related to the funds' distance from their inception and termination dates: underperformance intensifies as the fund termination date approaches, while, in contrast, there is some evidence that funds (weakly) outperform during their first year of existence