This paper examines the country and industry effects on the cross-sectional variance of firms' equity return in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries. Using the model developed by Heston and Rouwenhorst (1994), this article covers five ASEAN countries and ten industries. We find that pure country effects are, on average, more important than pure industry effects in explaining equity return variation of ASEAN firms. In terms of portfolio diversification strategies in ASEAN, our results show that country diversification is a more effective strategy for risk management than industry diversification. We also discuss the impacts of subprime mortgage crisis on ASEAN countries and industries.

This paper applies free cash flow and information asymmetry hypotheses to investigate whether managers pursuit their private benefits by using capital investment expenditure (hereafter CI) increases or not, and to explore whether managers decrease CI as more dividend payments under information asymmetry hypothesis. Consequently, the present study investigates the effect of CI increases on abnormal stock returns of Taiwanese listed firms. The empirical results show that during full period and the post financial tsunami period, the effects of an increase in CI on stocks returns are positive, and the CI-spread is negative. This supports the hypothesis of information asymmetry. However, in the electronics industry during the entire study period and the post financial tsunami period, the expenditure of low CI tends to support free cash flow hypothesis but that of high CI supports the hypothesis of information asymmetry.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract