Home     Abstracts and Full Text     Submit an Article      Author Guidelines     Manuscript Status    Q&A    Editorial Board     Write to Editors     Detailed Style Sheet    Subscribe/Join     Advertise     Permissions     Search     Eastern Finance Association    Iowa State University

The Financial Review

Abstracts and Full Text of of Volume 42, Number 4, November 2007

Click here to jump to abstracts or click on an article title to view the full text of the pre-publication version.

Stock-Split Post-Announcement Returns: Underreaction or Market Friction?

Rodney D. Boehme, Bartley R. Danielsen

Can Asset Pricing Models Price Idiosyncratic Risk in U.K. Stock Returns?

Jonathan Fletcher

Price Performance Following Share-Repurchase Announcements by Closed-End Funds

Aigbe Akhigbe, Doseong Kim, Jeff Madura

Diversification in Portfolios of Individual Stocks: 100 Stocks Are Not Enough

Dale L. Domian, David A. Louton and Marie D. Racine

 


Stock-Split Post-Announcement Returns: Underreaction or Market Friction?

Rodney D. Boehme, Bartley R. Danielsen

We explore the relationship between stock splits and subsequent long-term returns during the period from 1950 to 2000. We find that, contrary to much previous research, firms do not exhibit positive long-term post-split returns. Instead, we find that significant positive returns after the announcement date do not persist after the actual date of the stock split. We also observe that abnormal returns are correlated with the price-delay market friction measure of Hou and Moskowitz (2005). We conclude that the stock-split post-announcement “drift” is only of short duration, and it is attributable to trading frictions rather than behavioral biases.

Keywords: Stock splits, market efficiency, behavioral finance, long-run performance

Full text (subscription or article purchase required)

Go to the top of the page

Can Asset Pricing Models Price Idiosyncratic Risk in U.K. Stock Returns?

Jonathan Fletcher

I examine how well different linear factor models and consumption-based asset pricing models price idiosyncratic risk in U.K. stock returns. Correctly pricing idiosyncratic risk is a significant challenge for many of the models I consider. For some consumption-based models, there is a clear trade-off in the performance of the models between correctly pricing systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk. Linear factor models do a better job in most cases in pricing systematic risk than consumption-based models but the reverse is true for idiosyncratic risk.

Keywords: Idiosyncratic risk, stochastic discount factor

Full text (subscription or article purchase required)

Go to the top of the page

Price Performance Following Share-Repurchase Announcements by Closed-End Funds

Aigbe Akhigbe, Doseong Kim, Jeff Madura

We investigate the price performance of closed-end funds that announce share-repurchase programs. Closed-end funds experience positive average stock-price reactions to the announcements. The long-run buy-and-hold abnormal returns of repurchasing funds over the subsequent three years are significantly higher than a non-repurchasing control sample matched by size, type, investment style and geographic diversification. Funds with larger discounts, international funds, equity funds, and funds that announce larger repurchases or frequently announce repurchases, experience more positive stock-price reactions. Except for larger repurchases, the same characteristics are associated with more positive long-run buy-and-hold returns.

Keywords: Share repurchase, closed-end funds, mutual fund performance, long-run performance

Full text (subscription or article purchase required)

Go to the top of the page

Diversification in Portfolios of Individual Stocks: 100 Stocks Are Not Enough

Dale L. Domian, David A. Louton and Marie D. Racine

We examine returns and ending wealth in portfolios selected from 1,000 large U.S. stocks over a 20-year holding period. Shortfall risk, the possibility of ending wealth being below a target, is a useful metric for long horizon investors and is consistent with the Safety First criterion. Density functions obtained from simulations illustrate that shortfall risk reduction continues as portfolio size is increased, even above 100 stocks. A slightly lower risk can be achieved in small portfolios by diversifying across industries, but a greater reduction is obtained by simply increasing the number of stocks.

Keywords: diversification, investment horizon, Safety First, shortfall risk, simulations

Full text (subscription or article purchase required)

Go to the top of the page

Return to the home page

Full text articles are available on this site until publication. Eastern Finance Association members have free access to the full text of articles published in The Financial Review (now starting from the first quarterly issue in 1969) at our Blackwell Synergy site.  Join the EFA now at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/memb.asp?ref=0732-8516). You can also purchase individual articles online at our Blackwell Synergy site, but an EFA membership is a better value for individual academics.