In this paper we employ an event study approach with GARCH process to uncover whether there were positive impacts on the Taiwan’s stock market during the SARS outbreak period in 2003. The empirical results indicate that the SARS crisis did bring negative impacts on tourism and the wholesale and retail sectors. This result has been confirmed by many previous studies, but it is most important that the biotechnology sector saw positive shocks from the impacts of the SARS crisis. It is clear that the value effect of SARS outbreak seems to be asymmetrical within our sample firms. Therefore, fund managers and investors at that time were able to buy and hold biotechnology stocks and rearrange their portfolios to obtain investment profits, maintain portfolio returns, or lower investment risks during the SARS outbreak period in Taiwan. The government of Taiwan should support the developments of each industry sufficiently, and then these industries could help to protect the nation’s economy and residents’ health against any possible impact of disease, such as SARS.

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This paper examines that the impact of firm-specific characteristic on firm capital structure in Chinese-listed companies and attempts to solve a few puzzles existing in previous related studies. The key factors include state ownership, institutional ownership, and the risk of default. From the analyses of all samples, our results confirm that the expected default risk is important in explaining debt decision, but the influence of ownership structure is not significant. However, after separating high- and low-level from the firm leverage we find that the ownerships of state and institutions have a positive effect on corporate leverage in high-leveraged companies but not in low-leveraged firms. In addition, the positive impacts of external governance commonly occur in large firms. The observed findings provide some important implications for the role of external governance in Chinese-listed companies.

Banking consolidation is a global trend, but in Taiwan, after the failure of the Second Financial Reform, it does not have a clear policy for bank mergers. This paper investigates whether mergers influence the cost efficiency of banks in Taiwan, and our results suggest that the government should utilize market mechanism to encourage FHC or large banks" mergers. We use the method of stochastic frontier approach (SFA) to investigate the uncertain relationship between merger and the cost efficiency of Taiwanese banks. Based on Battese and Coelli (1995), we use maximum likelihood estimation method to estimate the stochastic cost efficiency model and the inefficient model simultaneously. We find that, for Taiwanese banks, technology efficiency increases with time by lowering operation cost; cost efficiency decreases right after merger, and has to wait for three years to regain efficiency. The larger banks and FHC banks benefit more from cost savings than smaller banks. JEL Classification: G21, G34

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