We extend the market timing literature to show that SEO timing can be characterized by the dynamics of liquidity risk. That is, firms tend to issue SEOs when liquidity risk declines to the point where investors have least concern of the risk. In the absence of liquidity risk, market risk rises right before SEOs and then gradually falls afterwards, consistent with the Q-theory (Carlson et al., 2010). However, once we include liquidity risk factor into the model for expected returns, issuing firms' market risk behaves like that of matched non-issuers, suggesting an omitted risk factor problem in SEO studies that does not take into account the effect of liquidity risk on stock returns. Furthermore, there is no evidence of post-issue long-run underperformance. Our results imply that, instead of timing alpha (i.e., exploiting overpricing, as behavioral finance has suggested), issuing firms time liquidity beta to minimize their cost of equity capital. The liquidity beta timing is especially evident in large offer size issuers.

This paper reconciles the persistence of aggregate real exchange rates with the faster adjustment of international relative prices in microeconomic data. Error correction model estimates indicate that a different mix of shocks drives international price deviations at the microeconomic level and that dynamic adjustment works through arbitrage in the goods market rather than the foreign exchange market. When half-lives are estimated conditional on a common set of estimated macro shocks, we find that micro relative prices exhibit every bit as much persistence as aggregate real exchange rates. These results challenge theories of real exchange rate persistence based on sticky prices and heterogeneity across goods.

This paper develops a dependence-switching copula model to examine dependence and tail dependence for four different market statuses, namely, rising-stocks/appreciating-currency, falling-stocks/depreciating-currency, rising-stocks/depreciating-currency, and falling-stocks/appreciating-currency. The model is then applied to daily stock returns and exchange rate changes for six major industrial countries over the 1990–2010 period. The dependence and tail dependence among the above four market statuses are asymmetric for most countries in the negative correlation regime, but symmetric in the positive correlation regime. These results enrich the findings in the existing literature and suggest that analyzing cross-market linkages within a time-invariant copula framework may not be appropriate.

This paper examines the predictability of corporate bond returns using the transaction-based index data for the period from October 1, 2002 to December 31, 2010. We find evidence of significant serial and cross-serial dependence in daily investment-grade and high-yield bond returns. The serial dependence exhibits a complex nonlinear structure. Both investment-grade and high-yield bond returns can be predicted by past stock market returns in-sample and out-of-sample, and the predictive relation is much stronger between stocks and high-yield bonds. By contrast, there is little evidence that stock returns can be predicted by past bond returns. These findings are robust to various model specifications and test methods, and provide important implications for modeling the term structure of defaultable bonds.

ABSTRACT We examine efficiency improvement associated with audit firm mergers. Our analysis is made possible by a unique dataset of audit hours in China. We find a significant reduction in audit hours, unaccompanied by a deterioration in audit quality, of merged audit firms. Further, we find a larger reduction in audit hours when acquirers are Chinese domestic Big 10 audit firms and when client firms are more complex. These results are consistent with the notion of economies of scale arising from horizontal mergers. However, enhanced efficiency does not necessarily reduce audit fees. Instead, we find an increase in audit fees when acquirers are international Big 4 audit firms even when we control for possible changes in market power. This premium is at least partially due to the certification effect of international Big 4 audit firms.