Securities

This study documents the nature of the underlying information that caused investor overreaction and under-reaction. While research has documented the existence of market overreaction and under-reaction, it has not comprehensively addressed the underlying information releases that caused the extreme price fluctuations. This study controls for the underlying announcements, and finds that the degrees of overreaction and under-reaction vary according to the underlying information releases. A primary contribution of this dissertation is the finding that undefined events are associated with higher degrees of overreaction than defined events. The Wall Street Journal Index was used to determine if each event had an announcement that coincided with it. Defined events are those for which an underlying announcement was found in the Wall Street Journal Index. For undefined events, no announcement was found. This finding supports the theory of investor overconfidence and biased self-attribution by Daniel, Hirshleifer, and Subrahmanyam (1998). This study analyzes the overreaction and under-reaction phenomenon in three areas: international securities, domestic securities, and foreign currency. The international securities analyzed are American depository receipts and international closed-end funds. The domestic securities analyzed are financial and non-financial stocks. In the foreign currency area, currencies are classified into two types: emerging country currencies and industrial country currencies. In all of these areas, controlling for the underlying announcements is beneficial in understanding market overreaction and under-reaction. Finally, cross-sectional regression equations are employed to relate post-event returns or exchange rate changes to different variables, such as initial price change, pre-event information leakage, size (market value), month of the year (December or January), day of the week, and announcement type. There is a substantial amount of evidence that suggests larger initial price movements and prevent information leakage are associated with higher degrees of overreaction, and that the tendency towards overreaction is stronger for undefined events.

This dissertation examines the pricing behavior of exchange traded funds (ETFs) in three essays. (1) The Overreaction of International ETFs, (2) Fragmentation of Night Markets, and (3) The Impact of the Creation of the QQQ on the Underlying Securities. The overreaction study examines the role of information in global overreaction. Univariate analysis reveals that overreaction associated with informed events is less pronounced than with uninformed events following extreme price decreases. Further, positive firm-specific announcements are met with investor overreaction while negative firm-specific announcements are not. Finally, significant reversals of winners during bull markets relative to bear markets support the hypothesis that bull markets contribute to investor overconfidence and overreaction. The fragmentation study examines the cost of market fragmentation across day and night trading sessions. Using a sample of intraday transaction data for three ETFs, I show that night markets do not impound information available in net order flow to the same degree as day markets. Bid-ask spreads are wider at night and these costs are due to higher order processing costs, market maker rents and higher inventory holding costs. Furthermore, market concentration costs at night are associated with significantly higher spreads. The QQQ creation study investigates whether the creation of tradable baskets of securities affects the pricing efficiency and risk of the underlying securities. The results show that extreme price movements in the post-QQQ period are met with less pronounced corrections than in the pre-QQQ period, and that this pricing pattern does not hold true for the control sample. A decomposition of spreads finds that quoted spreads widen and effective spreads tighten in the post-QQQ period. Furthermore, though more heavily weighted components of the QQQ experience tighter spreads, this benefit is less pronounced in the post-QQQ period implying relative benefits to the less heavily weighted components. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that liquidity is directly related to pricing efficiency, but this relationship lessens in the post-QQQ period. The results also show that systematic risk for the underlying securities declines while total risk rises, though the control sample experiences a similar rise in total risk.

This dissertation examines several research questions relating to securitization by non-financial firms. Finance theories suggest securitization is most beneficial when there is high demand for liquidity. On the other hand, empirical studies have shown that firms engage in securitization to manage earnings. I find that liquidity demand, not the incentive for earnings management motivates securitization transactions by non-financial firms. I also evaluate whether earnings management in securitization is indeed undesirable from a shareholder's perspective by examining the economic consequences of the practice. Because securitization creates a large infusion of cash, one way to evaluate the economic consequences of earnings management is to examine whether securitization proceeds encourage overinvestment. I find that earnings management in securitization (i.e., recording non-zero securitization income) is unrelated to firms' suboptimal) overinvestment in the post-securitization period. Thus, it appears that earning management in securitization has no negative economic consequence in terms of generating excess securitization proceeds that encourage overinvestment. I also examine the market's valuation of securitizable assets in the accrual components of earnings and the use of securitization proceeds. Because securitizable assets can be converted into cash through securitization, I test whether the market valuation reflects the source of liquidity in securitizable assets that is similar to the cash component of earnings. I find that, for securitization firms, the market valuation of securitizable assets is similar to that of the cash component of earnings.