Mei-Ping Chen

Industry herding and market states: evidence from Chinese stock markets

This paper uses firm-level data to examine whether investors follow each other into and out of the same industries in China’s A-share markets. Our study is a significant addition to the literature that investigates herding behaviour in an industry context with asymmetric herding effects with respect to different market states, different stock exchanges, and the role of the information technology sector. Using recent daily data from 17 May 2001 through 16 May 2011, we demonstrate strong evidence of industry herding in the A-share markets. Evidence further supports that stock return dispersions from the information technology sector play a significant role in explaining the other sectors’ herding activity. After examining bull and bear markets, herding is more profound in some sectors during a bull market. Finally, industry herding is more prevalent in the Shenzhen stock exchange, while for some sectors in the Shanghai stock exchange herding is more prevalent during a bull market state.

Asymmetric effects of investor sentiment on industry stock returns: Panel data evidence

Abstract This article employs a state-of-the-art panel threshold model by allowing for regime intercepts, in order to shed new light on the asymmetric/nonlinear effects of local and global sentiments on expected industry stock returns among 11 Asian countries during the period from 1996 to 2010. Empirical evidence demonstrates that once the regime intercept is included, the asymmetric effects of global sentiment on oil & gas, financials, and health care industry returns become less under optimism, as compared with under pessimism. More critically, the positive (negative) impact of global sentiment above (under) the threshold turns significant, indicating that global optimism leads industry returns to be overvalued, while pessimism leads them to be undervalued. For local market sentiment, our results support that higher local sentiment enhances the returns of basic materials, telecommunications, and utilities industries. The empirical results confirm that the nexus of industry returns and investor sentiments is subject to change between different sentimental intervals.

Dynamic relationships between industry returns and stock market returns

Abstract Different from prior studies which concentrate on the unidirectional impact of industry leading, this study examines the bi-directional dynamical causal relation between industry returns and stock market returns by considering multiple structural breaks for ten major eastern and southern Asia countries. Our results show that finance and consumer service industry returns have significant power in explaining the movements of market returns. Further, we apply logit regressions to explore the determinants of the leading hypotheses and find exchange rate and interest rate are important in explaining the industry–market nexus. In a developed market the industry and the market have feedback relations, but in a highly controlled economy the influence from the stock market dominates.

Determinants of ADR Returns before and after Domestic Stock Seasoned Equity Offerings: Evidence from Asian and Latin American Emerging Markets

This paper examines the critical determinants of American depository receipt (ADR) returns before and after domestic stock seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) for Asian and Latin American emerging economies during 1990--2007, which has never been probed in related issues. We employ the Time Series Cross Section Regressions and General Method of Moments methods to document that domestic stock returns play a vital role in explaining Latin American ADR returns, while US investor sentiment is crucial in explaining Asian ADR returns. Local investor sentiment is found to be considerably important than domestic stock returns in Asian ADR returns, while Latin American local investor sentiment (US investor sentiment) is more important before (after) domestic stock SEOs. The results do not support the view that ADR-reconciled earnings per share (EPS) and stock EPS provide significant information to explain ADR returns in Latin American and Asian emerging markets both before and after SEOs. Furthermore, international market differences in a specific geography should be considered when diversifying investments and efficiency accounting communication with accounting convergence does not need to be emphasized.

Co-movements of returns in the health care sectors from the US, UK, and Germany stock markets: Evidence from the continuous wavelet analyses

Abstract As the health care sector is one of the largest and fastest growing industries around the world, this study utilizes the wavelet approach to investigate the co-movement of returns in this sector from the US, UK, and Germany stock markets over the period of 1992–2013. Our results suggest that the return of the health care sector in the UK (US) stock market leads those in the US and Germany (Germany) stock markets in the short run and medium run, while the returns of the health care sector in the US stock market lead those in the UK stock market in the long run. We find the least (most) structural change in the return of the health care sector for the UK (US) stock market, as both countries belong to two extreme (i.e., public and private) health care systems. There is also an overall increase of long-run interdependence between UK and US health care sectors. Both the subprime mortgage crisis and global financial crisis caused clear contagion effects between the health care sectors of DE and UK as well as those of US and DE. Finally, our results highlight the importance of taking into consideration the time and frequency-varying properties of health care sectors’ stock return co-movement in international portfolios.

Why did some firms perform better in the global financial crisis

Abstract We explore what firm and macroeconomic factors assisted Chinese firms to resist the global financial crisis. We find that firms with higher top ten shareholder ratios or firms that are older exhibited saliently higher performance during the crisis, but performed poorly during the non-crisis period. Firm size has a notably negative impact on firm performance. Firms audited by the Big Four accounting firms have a significantly negative correlation with performance. During the crisis, stock markets became less efficient in incorporating firm-specific information into stock prices, signifying that the determinants of firm performance vary across non-crisis and crisis periods.