IN the Far East, the overall volume of intraregional trade is not as substantial as that of Europe, but much larger than that of Latin America.2 One rather unique and very interesting feature of Far Eastern intraregional trade is that one country, namely, Japan, stands out prominently, from the point of view of both the character and magnitude of its trade. Japan contributed about one-third of the Far Eastern intraregional trade in the immediate prewar years (32.3 per cent for 1935, 34.5 per cent for 1937, and 38.o per cent for I938). Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, its share suffered a sharp reduction, but again became a significant percentage of the total in 1949 (I6.5 per cent). The ratio of Far Eastern intraregional trade to its total export, and Japan's share in intraregional trade showed a tendency to fluctuate together.3 Since Japan's share was about one-third in the prewar period and its intraregional imports were related to the volume of total intraregional exports, several questions may be raised with regard to the future role of Japan in the intraregional trade of the Far East. What are the initial and secondary effects of Japan's imports from the Far East on the intraregional exports of the countries of this region? Does such relationship in the prewar period remain true in the postwar period? If there is a change of preand postwar relationships, what are some of the reasons for the change? How are Japan's imports from the Far East related to the over-all exports of the region to all countries? This paper is a preliminary attempt at an analysis of the above questions.

A theoretical model of the borrower–lender relationship predicts that increased competitive threats lead to a reduction in loan covenant restrictiveness that is stronger for groups of borrowers who face constraints to their ability to raise external financing or compete in the product market. These predictions arise because competition impacts the dynamics of borrower performance so that lenders must trade off the benefit of controlling agency problems against a heightened cost of lost product market opportunities for the borrower, ultimately lowering the optimal use of covenants. We find strong empirical support for these predictions, highlighting an important role of competition for optimal financial contracting rooted in underlying agency problems.

We consider mean-variance portfolio choice of a robust investor. The investor receives advice from J experts, each with a different prior for expected returns and risk, and follows a min-max portfolio strategy. The robust investor endogenously combines the experts' estimates. When experts agree on the main return generating factors, the investor relies on the advice of the expert with the strongest prior. Dispersed advice leads to averaging of the alternative estimates. The robust investor is likely to outperform alternative strategies. The theoretical analysis is supported by numerical simulations for the 25 Fama-French portfolios and for 81 European country and value portfolios.

This study documents that the market's responsiveness to earnings announcements declines significantly after the issuance of qualified audit reports for a sample of ‘subject to’ qualifications and consistency qualifications. The results are consistent with a hypothesis that audit qualifications reduce the market's responsiveness to earnings announcements by altering the market's perception of earnings noise or the persistence of earnings, or both. Alternatively, a decline in earnings response coefficients may be observed because audit qualifications are more likely in firms that have undergone economic or structural changes and these changes, rather than the qualification per se, lead to decreased persistence or increased noise.

Prior studies of discretionary accounting choices have generally relied on one or more proxy variables to measure closeness to debt covenant restrictions without actually examining the existence or extent of restrictive covenants. This study tests the validity of the most commonly used proxy, the debt–equity ratio, by examining its relation to actual debt covenant restrictions for a random sample of U.S. firms. The results indicate that several versions of the debt–equity ratio capture the existence and tightness of retained earnings restrictionsand the existence of net tangible asset and working capital restrictions, but are unrelated to four other covenant restrictions.

This paper documents the empirical distributions of daily trading volume prediction errors for several commonly used volume measures and expectation models for individual firms and for portfolios. The prediction errors for raw volume measures are significantly positively skewed, with thin left tails and fat right tails. However, natural log transformations of the volume measures are approximately normally distributed. For longer than one-day prediction intervals, recognition of autocorrelation in daily trading volume is advantageous for detecting abnormal trading. Results of analysis for clustering of events and for different size firms are also presented.

Non-fundamental demand shocks have significant effects on asset prices, but observing these shocks is challenging. We use the exchange-traded fund (ETF) primary market to study non-fundamental demand. Unique to the ETF market, specialized arbitrageurs called authorized participants correct violations of the law of one price between an ETF and its underlying assets by creating or redeeming ETF shares. We show theoretically and empirically that creation and redemption activities (ETF flows) provide signals of non-fundamental demand shocks. A portfolio that is short high-flow ETFs and long low-flow ETFs earns excess returns of 1.1–2.0% per month, consistent with non-fundamental demand distorting asset prices away from fundamental values. Moreover, we show non-fundamental demand imposes non-trivial costs on investors, leading to underperformance.