Ning Gong

Effectiveness and Market Reaction to the Stock Exchange's Inquiry in Australia

This paper examines a unique stock market monitoring program used by the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) . When the ASX observes unusual share price or trading volume changes of a listed company, it sends a letter demanding an explanation. Companies need to respond publicly to several stylized questions. Such public communications between the stock exchange and listed companies contain information. This paper documents how companies respond to the ASX inquiry and how the market reacts to the replies. It is found that some companies do release new information to the market when asked. After the firms reply is posted, the average trading volume and the bid-ask spread are reduced, and in most cases, the share price is also stabilized with the following two exceptions: (1) The price will continue to rally on average if the company releases only partial information when questioned after a significant price jump; (2) The downward price trend will be reversed if the company states that no new information could explain the decline. Furthermore, there are statistically significant, positive abnormal returns for the first five trading days, which are not conditional upon the replies firms give to the ASX inquiries. Copyright 2007 The Author Journal compilation (c) 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Role of Index Bonds in an Optimal Dynamic Asset Allocation Model with Real Subsistence Consumption

We investigate the role of index bonds in a dynamic consumption and asset allocation model where the rate of real consumption at any given time cannot fall below a fixed level. An explicit form of the optimal consumption and portfolio rule for a class of Constant Relative Risk Aversion (CRRA) utility functions is derived. Consumption increases above the subsistence level only when wealth exceeds a threshold value. Risky investments in equity and nominal bonds are initially proportional to the excess of wealth over a lower bound, and then increase nonlinearly with wealth. The desirability of investing in the risky assets are related to the agents risk preference, the equity premium, and the inflation risk premium. The demand for index bonds is also obtained. The results should be useful for the management of defined benefit pension funds, university endowments, and other portfolios which have a withdrawal pre-commitment in real terms.

“Underpricing of Privatised IPOs: The Australian Experience,”

We investigate the price performance of initial public offerings (IPOs) of formerly state-owned companies in Australia. On average, privatised IPOs in Australia are underpriced by about 11%, which is not significantly different from the magnitude of underpricing of the privately-owned IPOs and that of privatised share offerings in other OECD countries. While it appears that the magnitude of underpricing is correlated with the size of issues and the party affiliation of the presiding government, cross-sectional analysis of our sample does not support some traditional theoretical explanations of underpricing for privatised IPOs—only the market sentiment prior to the listing is identified as a significant factor in determining the degree of underpricing. We also investigate the impact of a two-tiered pricing structure on the performance of IPOs.

Bailouts, Monitoring, and Penalties: An Integrated Framework of Government Policies to Manage the Too‐Big‐To‐Fail Problem

This paper discusses optimal government bailout policy where the costs of systemic failures and moral hazard problems are considered. We find that a three‐tiered bailout policy that includes an ex post monitoring and bailout scheme for financial institutions with large systemic impacts (‘too big to fail’) is optimal. The optimal policy also requires a randomized bailout for medium‐impact institutions (‘Constructive Ambiguity’), and no bailout for institutions that have only minimal systemic consequences (‘too small to save’). However, in a volatile, innovative market environment where individual institutions may know more than the government regulator, monitoring error could contribute to risk taking, leaving the government regulator to always play a ‘catch‐up’ role in revising policy. Moreover, the optimal bailout policy may not be time‐consistent: institutions not deemed ‘too big to fail’ may still have an incentive to take excessive risks and expect to be bailed out in case of insolvency, primarily due to the short‐term orientation of the government. Finally, because an institutions systemic cost affects the probability of a bailout, we show that the boundary of an institution may be extended by the government subsidy.

Self-Imposed Investment Rationing in Light of Discretionary Disclosures

The role of investment rationing by one party to discipline reporting of private information by another is well recognized. Formally, adverse selection models succinctly capture this effect via the crisp information rents vs. efficiency tradeoff. This paper takes a different slant to investment rationing by showing that production cuts can also be self-imposed: by scaling down his upfront investments, an entrepreneur can discipline his own subsequent aggressive reporting behavior. In particular, in this paper, a higher investment by an entrepreneur raises his stakes, magnifying his incentives to acquire and selectively disclose information in order to manipulate market price. Of course, the rational market is not fooled and responds by suitably discounting price. As a consequence, the upfront lowering of investment permits the entrepreneur to credibly signal to the market that he will limit his shenanigans thereby also limiting retaliatory market penalties.

Can Socially Responsible Firms Survive Competition? An Analysis of Corporate Employee Matching Grant Schemes

Employee matching grant schemes are coordination mechanisms that reduce free-riding by socially-conscious employee-donors. Matching schemes coupled with lower take-home pay than offered by non-matching firms will survive capital and labor market competition if employee type is not observable and socially-conscious employees are more productive or value working together. Matching can enhance employee welfare and raise more for charity without reducing profits. We document that matching firms have higher labor productivity and are more likely to be ranked as one of the “100 Best�? employers. The result is robust to managerial entrenchment concerns and is not confined to the high-tech sector.