Warwick Anderson

Alternative event study methodology for detecting dividend signals in the context of joint dividend and earnings announcements

Friction models are used to examine the market reaction to the simultaneous disclosure of earnings and dividends in a thin-trading environment. Friction modelling, a procedure using maximum likelihood estimation, can be used to replace both the market model and restricted least-squares regression in event studies where there are two quantifiable variables and a number of possible interaction effects associated with the news that constitutes the studys event. The results indicate that the dividend signal can be separated from the earnings signal.

Company characteristics and compliance with ASX corporate governance principles

Purpose – This study aims to examine whether company characteristics determine the structure and composition of a company’s board. In particular, it investigates the three board-design choices that Australian-listed companies make in the context of Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) corporate governance principles (published in 2003) where they are allowed to depart from the recommended best-practice board structure if the departure better serves their unique board and governance requirements. Design/methodology/approach – A logistic regression is performed on a cross-section of data for 258 ASX-listed companies averaged over the years 2004 to 2007, using the company variables size, age, leverage, ownership concentration, profitability, liquidity, price-earnings ratio, market-to-book ratio and cross-listing. Findings – The study finds that size has a strong, statistically significant impact on all three principles. Ownership concentration, price-earnings ratio and age have statistically significant impacts o...

A Revised Trade-to-Trade Model for All Levels of Trading Thinness in Event Studies

This paper offers an improvement to the trade-to-trade model for event studies. While the trade-to-trade model of Maynes and Rumsey (1993) addresses the problem of thin trading by eliminating periods in which no trading is recorded, the proposed improvement addresses the influence of zero-value returns resulting from liquidity trading. This entails segmentation by the sign of company returns (positive, negative, zero). The approach allows for all levels of thinness in security trading. It is evaluated against the trade-to-trade methodology developed by Maynes and Rumsey (1993) and the Market Model using Monte Carlo simulations developed from the method of Brown and Warner (1980 and 1985). The improved trade-to-trade model is better at picking up the presence of very small levels of abnormal performance.