Tony Chieh-tse Hou

FDI modes and parent firms' productivity in emerging economies:Evidence from Taiwan

This article investigates the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the productivity of parent firms for multinational enterprises in Taiwan. The current research specifically examines the potential differences in productivity effect between FDI toward developing (vertical FDI) and developed countries (horizontal FDI) and between electronics and non-electronics firms. Using panel data on Taiwan firms from 2000 to 2005, results obtained using propensity score matching (PSM) show thatmultinational firms experience a higher productivity following their FDI in developing countries. A time lag exists in productivity gain of investment to developed countries, and is relevant only to electronics firms. Employing the generalized method of moment of the panel fixed model to control for problems of endogeneity and unobservable heterogeneity, the empirical finding suggests that productivity effect caused by investing in developing countries remains significantly positive. A lagged productivity-enhancing effect is also found after FDI in developed countries for both electronics and non electronics firms.

Investors’ Reactions to Analysts’ Forecast Revisions and Information Uncertainty Evidence of Stock Price Drift

This study examines the relationship among analysts’ earnings forecast revisions, information uncertainty, and stock returns and provides new evidence that stock price drift occurs after analysts’ earnings forecast revisions. Using data from the Australian stock market over the period of 1992 to 2009, we find that the stocks with upward earnings revisions experience positive returns, while stocks with downward revisions have negative returns. The effect is more prominent in stocks with high information uncertainty. The results are robust after controlling for market conditions, seasonality, and risks. Our evidence supports the conservatism bias model that investors tend to underweight the public information, such as analysts’ earnings forecast revisions. Importantly, our evidence provides possible explanations about the violation of the efficient market hypothesis. Our results suggest that the conservative bias causes investors not to sufficiently update their beliefs and eventually results in subsequent return continuation as investors’ underreaction to analysts’ earnings forecast revision is stronger with higher information uncertainty.

Momentum Strategies, Information Diffusion, and Investor Conservatism in Asian-Pacific Region

This study performs an out-of-sample test on momentum effects in nine Asian-Pacific stock markets from 1990 to 2002. We find little evidence on the existence of intermediate stocks return momentum. Specifically, the unrestricted momentum trading strategies appear profitable only in major developed countries but not in the emerging countries in our samples. We further investigate momentum effects through two behavioural theories: Hong and Stein’s (1999) gradual-information-diffusion model and Barberis et al.’s (1998) investor conservatism bias model. Our results support Barberis et al. (1998) model but reject the Hong and Stein’s information diffusion hypothesis. It shows the profitability of momentum strategies is positively related to analyst coverage but negatively related to analysts’ forecast dispersion. We argue that investors’ psychological conservatism biases reflect slow updating of their beliefs and underrate the importance of new information. Interestingly, we also find that book-to-market is more important than dispersion and dispersion is more important than size in explaining momentum returns.

Stock Series Holiday Regressors Generated from Flow Series Holiday Regressors

Stock economic time series, such as end-of-month inventories, arise as the cumulative sum of monthly inflows and outflows over time, i.e., as accumulations of monthly net flows. In this article, we derive holiday regressors for stock series from cumulative sums of flow-series holiday regressors. This is similar to how stock trading day regressors have been derived. The stock holiday regressors from this approach have a very simple and appealing form when the flow regressors have standard properties. The modeling, forecasting and graphical results we present, for Easter effects in U.S. manufacturing inventories and for Chinese New Year effects in economic indicator inventory series of Taiwan, confirm the utility of this first general approach tomodeling stock holiday effects. As with estimated holiday effects fromflowseries,we find that stock holiday effects are usually larger than trading day effects but smaller than seasonal effects.

The impacts of stock characteristics and regulatory change on mutual fund herding in Taiwan

This article analyses the trading activity of Taiwanese open-end equity mutual fund herding behaviour over the period of 1996–2008. We found evidence of both directional and directionless herding. We also found that sell-side fund herding leads to price stabilization, whereas buy-side herding results in prices adjusting slowly. We found that the abolition of qualified foreign institutional investor (QFII) has reduced directionless and sell-side herding but has had no effect on buy-side herding.

Mutual Fund Herding in Taiwan

This paper analyzes the trading activity of Taiwanese open-end equity mutual fund herding behaviour over the period of 1996 to 2008. We employ the herding measure suggested by Wermers (1999) and find strong evidence of both directional and directionless herding activities, and also of positive feedback trading by mutual fund managers in Taiwan. Our results show a stronger tendency to herd among growth stocks, along with a high level of sell-side herding in value stocks. Moreover, we also find the importance of turnover ratio and price-earnings ratio in determining the directional herding activities. Finally, consistent with previous studies, we find this herding behaviour neither destabilises nor stabilises to stock prices.