No abstract

"We examine opportunistic behavior of initial public offering (IPO) firms in Taiwan where they are required to disclose their own earnings forecasts and are unrestricted in releasing news around the offerings. We find that prior to the offerings, IPO firms tend to report higher earnings, disclose inflated earnings forecasts, and manage more good news. News management, however, emerges as the most predominant factor in aftermarket stock prices. In particular, IPO firms have a strong preference for releasing good news related to strategy/policy that may simply provide a vision of a firm's future. Furthermore, the news releases are often forward-looking when they are positive about the firms but tend to be realized when they are negative. IPO firms also tend to engage in more window dressing activities before a larger sale of IPO shares from existing shareholders or a larger decline in insiders' holdings. Our analysis shows that managerial optimism cannot fully account for their behavior". Copyright (c) 2010 Financial Management Association International.

This article uses panel data from 1976 to 2003 to investigate the ways in which banking and stock markets influence economic growth in situations of high and low country risk. The mean and Standard Deviation (SD) of country risk are adopted to classify 28 countries into Low Risk Low Volatility (LRLV) and High Risk High Volatility (HRHV) subgroups. Through the technique of error correction-based panel co-integration developed by Westerlund (2007), several results are obtained. First, LRLV countries can expand the capitalization of stock market to enhance long-term economic growth. Second, HRHV countries, on the other hand, use two distinct strategies to promote long-term economic growth. Initially they develop their equity markets, which promote economic growth directly. Strengthened equity markets, in turn, aid in the development of credit markets, which subsequently brings an economic boom. Finally, regardless of selected subgroups, the contribution of stock market capitalization to economic growth appears to be substantially larger than that of bank credit, highlighting the importance of stock markets.

In this article, we device a methodology to value water using Fuzzy theory that incorporates not only the physical cost of delivery but also the social and sustainable resource costs that water regulators often ignore. Specifically, we include the cost of water quality, cost of water resource, gross domestic product per capita and the household's willingness to pay into our estimation. We demonstrate the approach using the household sector in Shanghai where the residents face potential water shortage and poor water quality. We estimate a theoretical price of 1.82 Chinese Yuan per cubic meter for the average household.

The study contributes to the literature that pre‐merger market sentiment plays a significant role in the choice of payment method in M&As and further impacts the market reactions to such related deals around the deal announcement date. Stock is more likely to be overvalued and chosen as the medium of exchange when the market is in the bullish periods. The higher investor sentiment prior to the deals setting under the cash payment, the better abnormal stock returns of such deals around the deal announcement date. The two commonly used sentiment indexes, BWI and CSI, are both representative for the market sentiment in relation to the choice of M&A payment methods, but the investor sentiment index, BWI, is more powerful on explaining the relationship with market reactions.