We investigate the effects on stock prices around the Ex-rights Dates (EDs) of rights offerings by firms listed on the Italian Stock Exchange. We focus on the period from January 2007 to April 2011, whereby several operations have been highly dilutive. Highly dilutive rights offerings show high subscription price discount of the new equities issued with respect to the prevailing stock market price. The anomalous behaviour of the prices attracted the attention of the Italian Authority for the Financial Markets (CONSOB). Our results demonstrate a significant average abnormal return of 5.85% on the ex-rights date, which is mostly driven by highly dilutive operations. In particular, we try to explain abnormal returns considering several variables related to the issue and to the issuer. We also control for differences across sectors. We find that the price-adjustment coefficient K explains most of the abnormal returns. We highlight that the stock price adjustment at the ED is so relevant in the case of highly dilutive operations to be similar to a stock splits and could have puzzled investors about the stock’s fair price. Furthermore, we examine the consequences on the option rights market, the trading volume and the Italian derivative market
This article aims at comparing two major equity index construction methodo- logies, the capitalization-weighted and the equally weighted approaches. Focusing on the constituents of the DJ Euro Stoxx index from January 2002 to December 2011, it provides further evidence to add to the established literature on this topic, of the higher risk-adjusted returns achieved by equally weighted portfolios in comparison with cap-weighted indexes. The novelty of our study is that we test these findings on the Euro stock market by using four reweighting frequencies (monthly, quarterly, semiannually and annually) with the aim of identifying that which is most able to maximize the benefits of the contrarian strategy implicit in the equally weighted approach. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the excess returns are not driven solely by a ‘size effect’ that usually explains the difference in perfor- mance of the two methodologies. Finally, we confirm our results by performing a Fama- French (1992) three-factor regression analysis and also by using a portfolio approach based on the market capitalization of the index constituents. To evaluate the implementation of the EW strategy, from an operational perspective, we estimate the related transaction costs and show that trading costs are not able to affect the main results
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