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This study examines the performance of institutional trades in the context of recent analyst recommendation changes. We report several findings. First, institutional trades depend little on sell-side activity; they go against recent recommendation changes about as often as with them. Second, abnormal returns to institutional trading are negative, a finding consistent with the previous literature. Third, returns are most harmful when trades go against recent analyst recommendation changes. Fourth, institutional investment returns are still negative, but much less so, for trades that occur in quarters following no change in the consensus recommendation, yet are significantly positive for trades in accordance with previous recommendation changes. The difference in return between trades that agree with and trades that disagree with previous recommendation changes is 4–5.5% in the next quarter. Our results strongly suggest that institutional managers could increase their returns by merely following sell-side analysts' advice more often.

We study the informational efficiency of the Saudi stock market (SSM), while accounting for corporate governance change, based on single, multiple, and variance ratio-based WALD tests and runs test. The main findings indicate that when the whole period is considered, the random walk hypothesis is rejected, but when divided into two sub-periods separated by the pre-corporate governance and the period marked by corporate governance change, the analysis demonstrates sub-period improvement in weak-form efficiency for the examined series. Robustness of results is verified by analysis using sector indices, which point to market efficiency. Interestingly, Hurst Exponent estimates evidence long-range dependence which suggests the predictability of stock prices and the prospect of speculative opportunities.

The stock characteristics often used in securities litigation to assess market efficiency are dispositive indicators of reactivity to earnings announcements. Stocks with large capitalization, high trading volume, broad analyst coverage, a large number of market makers, and narrow bid-ask spread are far more likely to react significantly to earnings announcements than stocks without these characteristics. Univariate and multivariate tests compel this conclusion, but provide weaker evidence for analyst coverage.

We build on the intuitive, albeit overlooked, relationship between investor attention and investor sentiment to explore the open question of the impact of investor sentiment on aggregate stock returns. We find that investor attention causes changes in sentiment but not vice versa. Moreover, the effect of attention on sentiment is short-lived for medium and large stocks although persists for small stocks. We also document the existence of an important mediating role of attention in the link between sentiment and aggregate stock returns. Investor attention alters the predictability value of sentiment in future aggregate returns, providing new insight into the information content of investor sentiment as it relates to investor attention. We find that sentiment caused by investors’ inattentiveness mainly drives the underlying potent relationship between investor sentiment and aggregate stock returns. Our results accord with the notion that investor attention generally improves market efficiency.

The main objective of this study is to distinguish whether the forecast dispersion anomaly is due to Miller’s (J Finance 32(4):1151–1168, 1977) overpricing hypothesis or idiosyncratic risk, by conditioning the sample on “buy” and “sell” consensus recommendations. Observations on the long and short possibilities provided to the investors by the analyst stock recommendations can help us infer on the impact of short sale constraints even though they are not directly observed. This study provides strong evidence that the impact of analyst forecast dispersion is more pronounced in the group of stocks that receive the least favorable recommendations in a given period, even after controlling for the idiosyncratic risk, Fama–French factors (J Financ Econ 33(1):3–56, 1993; J Financ Econ 116(1):1–22, 2015) and even short-sale constraints. These results are consistent with Miller’s (1977) hypothesis, according to which if short-sale constraints bind, high opinion divergence stocks become overpriced and hence have low subsequent returns.

In this paper, we examine whether nominal stock price can help to explain the ex-dividend day anomaly where stock prices drop by less than the dividend amount on the ex-dividend date. We find that stocks with lower nominal prices have ex-dividend day price drops that are more consistent with theoretical predictions based on an efficient market. After controlling for factors that have been previously documented to influence ex-dividend day stock price behavior, price-drop-to-dividend ratios are closer to one for lower priced stocks. To further explore this phenomenon, we examine the change in the price-drop-to-dividend ratio around stock splits. Firms that split their shares have a larger price-drop-to-dividend ratio after the split, and companies that reverse split their shares have a smaller price-drop-to-dividend ratio after the split. Our evidence indicates that ex-dividend day stock price behavior is influenced by the nominal price of a share and that this relation could also influence the decision to split a firm’s shares.

We examine the informational efficiency of size-based US exchange traded funds (ETFs) and comparable Center for Research in Security Prices portfolios. ETFs are better suited for market efficiency tests since they avoid potential asynchronous trading problems, and their negligible bid-ask spreads greatly diminish noise due to the bid-ask bounce. Variance ratio analysis demonstrates that return autocorrelations have diminished significantly over the past decade. Granger causality tests reject the presence of lead-lag effects among size-based ETFs. However, volatility spills over from large firm ETFs to those of smaller firms, and these spillovers extend to ETF option implied volatilities.

This study examines the manipulation of stock prices in Taiwan stock markets. Using a new set of hand-collected data, we examine the characteristics and patterns of manipulated stocks and their effects on the market. Our results show that manipulated firms tend to be small and to have poor corporate governance. Most manipulation cases involve a “pump-and-dump” trading strategy and stabilization operations. Pump-and-dump manipulations lead to high temporary price impacts, increased volatility, large trading volumes, short-term price continuation, and long-term price reversals during the manipulation period. They therefore have an important impact on market efficiency. In stabilization cases, the manipulation has no impact on market performance, except that the price drop and abnormal returns of the post-manipulation period are significantly lower than during the pre-manipulation period. Firm fundamentals are important in deciding the price impacts of stock manipulation. Compared with manipulated firms with positive fundamentals, the manipulation of firms with negative fundamentals has a more detrimental effect on market efficiency.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide additional evidence about the effect of discretionary current accruals on the pricing of IPOs. This paper seeks to discriminate between two alternative explanations for the prior findings: (1) behavioral biases coupled with limited arbitrage; and (2) the sample- and period-specific nature of the results in the prior literature. The IPOs from 1962 to 1998 were used to obtain the following results. First, there was not a negative association observed between discretionary current accruals and subsequent price performance for the 1926–1971 period. Second, analysis reveals that the pattern of cross-sectional evidence is inconsistent with the predictions made by behavioral theories. Third, in the 1972–1998 period, evidence of predictable negative performance attributable to IPO discretionary current accruals is limited to NASDAQ firms. These findings are difficult to reconcile with the explanation of behavioral biases coupled with limited arbitrage.

This paper examines the uncertain information hypothesis on one major index and its corresponding exchange-traded fund: the S&P 500 Index and SPDRs in the pre-SPDRs (01/63–12/93) and post-SPDRs (01/94–12/03) periods. Two strategies are used to measure the economic significance of the uncertain information hypothesis. Overall, we present evidence confirming the uncertain information hypothesis in the post-SPDRs period. However, we fail to convert the statistically significant gains observed into economic gains under a conservative approach. In addition, the degree of difference in the volatilities of the 5-day post-event returns (in both the S&P 500 and the SPDR) among the three subgroups diminishes in the post-SPDR period. Hence, we conclude that the market is in fact short-term efficient in a more realistic setting.

Autocorrelation in daily returns of the Dow 30 Index fluctuates significantly over time and reveals a declining trend after World War II. The relation between autocorrelation and volatility is negative and nonlinear. The relation between autocorrelation and volume is also negative and nonlinear. Returns exhibit positive autocorrelation during years with higher autocorrelation, and negative autocorrelation during years with lower autocorrelation. Positive autocorrelation appears more frequently during periods of low volatility, while negative autocorrelation appears more frequently during periods of high volatility. Current period's autocorrelation is related to previous period's autocorrelation and to both the previous and the current period's volatility and rate of return, which implies that investors incorporate previous period's pattern of market behavior into their trading strategy.

We reexamine and extend tests of the uncertain information hypothesis (UIH) proposed by Brown, Harlow, and Tinic (1988, 1993). We find that their empirical results are sensitive to the sampling procedure employed and that their particular methodology does not sufficiently distinguish between event and nonevent periods. When the sampling procedure is modified to identify only relatively large, isolated events, the test results generally do not support the UIH. Instead, significant price shocks are consistently followed by short-lived price reversals. We observe this behavior following positive and negative events regardless of whether the event is classified as risk increasing or risk decreasing.

In this paper we show that, similar to NYSE/AMEX stocks, NASDAQ stocks exhibit significant ex date returns for reverse stock splits. Although the 10-day cumulative return after the ex date is close to −10%, this does not violate market efficiency, because the average bid-ask spread for the reverse split stock is at least double this return. We also document that these large negative returns are mostly due to a drop in the ask price while bid prices barely change at all. Furthermore, the ex date returns are negatively related to trading volume. These results suggest that there is abnormal selling and a significant buildup of market makers' inventories near the ex date. To reduce the inventory buildup, market makers lower ask prices to induce buying by investors, resulting in the observed negative returns. Lowering bid prices, an alternative strategy for reducing inventories, is not attractive to market makers due to competitive factors and the reduction of commissions associated with a smaller number of transactions. Notably, selling investors have no incentives to sell their stocks early to avoid the observed negative ex date return, since this return is largely an ask price phenomenon and does not represent realized returns to sellers.

This article analyzed potential interactions between seasonals and price adjustment delays on estimated systematic risk. It was shown that seasonals in unobservable true security returns can induce inconsistencies into the generalized Scholes and Williams estimator of systematic risk. An alternative estimator was proposed that is consistent in the presence of seasonals in the unobservable true returns. The direction of induced bias is unpredictable a priori, thereby representing a potentially important research consideration in market efficiency tests using abnormal returns. NASDAQ and Dow Jones 30 Industrial return data for the period 1983–87 were used to evaluate the proposed estimator against the OLS and generalized Scholes and Williams (GSW) alternatives. The absolute difference between the GSW and our estimator, that is the seasonal-induced bias, for NASDAQ stocks was negatively correlated with market capitalization. Moreover, seasonal-induced bias was larger for NASDAQ stocks than more highly capitalized Dow stocks. These empirical findings indicate that seasonals and price adjustment delays can interact to bias estimated systematic risk, where price adjustment delays would be projected to be more acute for smaller capitalization stocks.

Market-return data and a multivariate regression model are used to investigate the impact of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 (OBRA) on the wealth of shareholders of firms sponsoring overfunded and underfunded pension plans during the period surrounding the passage of OBRA. Assuming semistrong market efficiency, a reduction in the pension insurance effect associated with the passage of OBRA was hypothesized to have a negative impact on the security prices of all plan sponsors. In general, the market reacted unfavorably to sponsors of both overfunded and underfunded defined-benefit pension plans when OBRA was introduced. However, the market reaction varied as a function of the funding-level change during the period preceding passage of the Act.