G14 - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider TradingReturn

This paper attempts to portray the empirical difference in investors' perception towards the cross-border and domestic merger and acquisition (M&A) announcements of UK acquirer firms reflected through the significant abnormal stock return. The researcher conducts a short-run event study on the daily stock return of 100 UK bidding firms (50 involved in domestic and 50 involved in cross-border M&As between 2015 and 2016) to compare any significant abnormal returns (AAR and CAAR) around the event announcement period. National and international mergers and acquisitions have witnessed a considerable expansion globally, with the United Kingdom being one of the pioneers in the worldwide market for corporate domination. Research results exhibit that in domestic M&A bidding, firms experience a significant positive announcement return (CAAR) in the event window (t1 ̶ t0) redolent to the positive expectation of investors from the M&A transaction. However, the post-announcement negative return concurrently proves the initial overreaction of investors and the semi-efficient market hypothesis. Foreign M&As result in an insignificant positive return (CAAR) in all the three event windows. There was existence of a positive trend in the cross-border pre-event return (AAR) indicative of narrow possibilities of insider trading or investors' optimistic anticipation, but this is not significantly conclusive.

The estimation of multiple structural break models is usually associated with identification of spurious break points, which are identified by universal algorithms. This leads to overvaluation of structural distress in financial markets represented by data series. The paper is focused on an estimation of the new index, which incorporates results of Student, Bartlett, GLR, Mann-Whitney, Mood, Lepage, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and finally Cramer-von-Mises tests statistics together. The new measure is named Structural Distress Index and evaluates a probability of structural break occurrence based on estimations of proposed models. SDI values show that Czech and Polish stock markets went through more instable period in 1990s than at the beginning of the global financial crisis in 2007. SDI measure is straightforward and can be easily explained, the highest values of SDI can identify the most important break points of the research period, which starts in year 1993 and ends in year 2014. Universality of SDI offers its further extension and application to further research of financial markets.

In the present study, I explore interday correlations between open-to-close and opening stock returns. Employing intraday price data on all the stocks that were S&P 500 Index constituents during the period from 1993 to 2013, I find that stock returns in opening trading sessions systematically tend to be higher following days with relatively low (either negative, or lower than the same day's market) open-to-close returns. Moreover, I explicitly document the tendency of opening stock returns to be reversed (to change their sign) following previous day's open-to-close returns. This kind of price behaviour seems to contradict stock market efficiency, and may be potentially interpreted as stock price 'corrections' following their 'deviations' from the underlying values caused by noise trading during the continuous trading sessions. Based on this finding, for the sampling period, I construct two different daily-adjusted investment portfolios based on the opening trading sessions and involving a long position in the stocks on the days when their opening returns are expected to be high and a short position in the stocks on the days when their opening returns are expected to be low. Both portfolios are found to yield significantly positive returns, even after accounting for trading commissions, providing an evidence for practical applicability of the documented pattern in opening stock prices.

It is possible to say that no matter how the Efficient Market Hypothesis has been criticized and/or overhauled, a degree of the relevant data proliferation is crucial to the investor's decision making process. The information asymmetry is then a phenomenon which creates distortions in a performance of the capital market. The "pseudoeffective" market model is attempting to highlight the impact of this phenomenon on some macroeconomic variables conducive to the general economic equilibrium.

In the discussion on the relationship between spot and forward prices in electricity markets, the equilibrium approach has an unambiguous prevalence. It is the relative recency of this market that gives rise to the question of how precisely forward prices converge to the spot prices. We decide to measure this convergence, with its eventual imbalance called risk premium, on several European energy exchanges trading electricity futures. The concept of risk premium, as it is worked out by Bessembinder and Lemon (2002) is reviewed in our essay through the Markowitz portfolio theory. Unlike in the B-L model, where the variance of the spot price has a strictly negative relationship to the risk premium, it is shown that the portfolio theory gives us a different inference that the variance can have both negative and positive impacts according to the strength of supply and demand in the market. This empirically tested and found appropriate. Positive dependence of variance in the electricity markets have been found in Central Europe and Scandinavia, while in Iberian the results are still negative.

Using 4-dimensional panel data (time, industry, country, companies) we examine the differences between European quoted and non-quoted companies at the level financial performance and some financial ratios. We find that quoted companies perform significantly better not only in terms of profit, but also in terms of cash flow generation. We also find some interesting differences in financial structure, liquidity and collection and credit period, not only from the perspective of quotation, but also between European regions (thus different trade habits), e.g. significantly longer credit period and collection period for countries with more relaxed trade habits (Spain, Italy, France). Our findings have some indirect implications for agency theory, for view of different accounting standards conservatism and earnings management, as well as (mainly) for business and stock valuation and financial planning.