In a recent provocative paper in this journal, Mark J. Kamstra et al. (2000) test and reject the hypothesis that the mean weekend return following changes in daylight saving time equals the mean weekend return throughout the rest of the year. The authors report that the average Friday-to-Monday return on daylight-saving weekends is 200–500 percent larger than the average negative return for the other weekends of the year. The Ž nding appears to hold not only in the United States and Canada where daylightsaving date patterns are similar, but also in the United Kingdom, whose patterns ostensibly differ from those in North America. The results also appear robust to alternative statistical methods based on time-varying conditional heteroscedasticity and/or bootstrapping. This paper provides further robustness tests of the results reported by Kamstra et al. I show that the difference between mean weekend returns for daylight-saving and non-daylightsaving weekends is signiŽ cant only for fall changes in daylight saving time and that the fall difference is driven by two outliers associated with international stock market crises. Two separate adjustments for the heteroscedasticity these outliers induce cause the signiŽ cance of the fall difference to vanish. The total sample (spring plus fall) difference remains marginally signiŽ cant for some indexes after heteroscedasticity adjustments with classical Ž xed-level hypothesis tests. However, Bayesian sample-size adjustments produce posterior odds ratios that consistently favor the null hypothesis of no daylight-saving anomaly over the alternative that the anomaly exists. I also fail to reject the hypothesis that daylight-saving and nondaylight-saving weekend returns have equal distributions. For these reasons, I question the robustness of the Ž ndings reported by Kamstra et al. (2000). Section I presents more details of my tests, and Section II summarizes my Ž ndings and discusses their interpretation.

Despite serious governance concerns revealed in Rule 144A and/or Regulation S Global Depositary Receipt (GDR) circulars, institutional investors voluntarily purchase these illiquid securities. Like issuers of Level III American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), GDR issuers exhibit strong pre-offer performance, with higher average Tobin's q ratios, sales growth rates, sales levels, returns on equity, and dividend payout ratios than their home-market counterparts. However, GDRs are issued predominantly by firms in emerging markets, while ADRs are issued mostly by firms in developed markets. After controlling for country and industry effects, we find that ADR issuers are larger and that they employ more reputable underwriters than GDR issuers do, but no other significant differences emerge. Notwithstanding their similarities, GDRs have larger discounts than ADRs, suggesting that legal bonding provides benefits that reputational bonding cannot fully replicate. However, within the sample of GDRs, pre-offer performance attributes also influence pricing. Specifically, discounts vary inversely with issue size but directly with firm size, suggesting that economies of scale exist in the GDR issue process and that potential agency costs are higher in larger firms. GDR discounts also vary inversely with incremental returns on equity in all partitions of the data, indicating the importance of pre-offer profitability in establishing the reputation of the issuing firm and in increasing the GDR offer price.

J. Michael Pinegar, R. Ravichandran, U.S. Investors' Perceptions of Corporate Control in Mexico: Evidence from Sibling ADRs, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 213-230

Between 1992 and 1997, Indian firms were the most frequent issuers of equity-backed Global Depositary Receipts (GDRs) governed by the SEC's Rule 144A and Regulation S. They also accounted for the highest dollar volume. Home-market stock price responses to these issues are consistent with the hypotheses that GDRs enable firms to resolve two forms of information asymmetry: (1) an asymmetry between issuing firms and international investors that results from market segmentation and (2) an asymmetry between Indian firms and home-market investors that resembles asymmetries that help explain abnormal returns in equity private placements by US firms. Our evidence suggests that GDR issuance can increase investors' recognition of underlying shares even if there are no liquidity enhancements and even if disclosure requirements are not as demanding as those imposed on foreign firms whose depositary receipts trade in public US markets.

Despite nonstationarities in the factor betas and factor prices of the Chen, Roll, Ross (1986) multifactor model, investors are rewarded for bearing risks associated with the change in expected inflation and industrial production in non-January months; however, variations in these factors have opposite influences on stock prices. These findings may partially explain why several recent studies fail to detect a significant non-January risk premium in the stock market, but this evidence is only suggestive since theoretical and statistical difficulties prevent precise interpretations of specific pricing relations in the Chen, Roll, Ross model.

February and August peaks in the growth rates of the seasonally unadjusted Industrial Production Index follow the stock market peaks documented by Rozeff and Kinney (1976) by one month. Coefficients on one-month lead growth rates in industrial production for small firms are positive and significant in time-series regressions even in the presence of the market factor. Moreover, whereas returns on large firms' stocks unidirectionally Granger cause (i.e., predict) future growth rates in industrial production at least six months in advance, returns on small firms' stocks reflect one-month lead as well as past growth rates in industrial production. For these reasons, we argue that seasonal real growth provides a partial explanation for the January stock seasonal among small firms.

This paper examines the effect of risk differences on the oft-documented negative rela? tionship between stock returns and inflation. We find risk-related patterns of coefficients on our estimates of the level and change in expected inflation and on unexpected inflation. These patterns are consistent with the hypothesis developed in Fama [2] and in Geske and Roll [7] that future real output growth simultaneously helps to determine current stock returns and various measures of inflation.

We document a January seasonal in the U.S. market for long-term corporate bonds that becomes more evident as the bond rating declines. Moreover, a similar, but weaker, relation is observed for the stocks of firms with low-quality bonds. These patterns may relate to firm size since bond ratings and firm size in our sample are positively related. However, even our smallest firms are relatively large. Much of the January effect we document appears to be consistent with the tax-loss selling hypothesis.