Business

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 34
  • (2010) Karbouris, Michael
    Thesis

  • (2012) Huang, Xuxing
    Thesis
    This study evaluates the short-term valuation impact of U.S. class action lawsuits by focusing on both sued and non-sued foreign companies listed in the United States. Using a comprehensive database that includes stock- and company-level information in both the U.S. and local home markets, I examine how private U.S. securities litigations affect the market value of both sued foreign companies and peer foreign firms not accused of wrongdoing. I find that during the event period surrounding the lawsuit-filing date, there is a significant negative stock price reaction for the sued foreign companies. Moreover, investors also tend to react negatively towards non-sued foreign issuers during this period. The logistic regression results also suggest that the determinants of lawsuit propensity are similar for foreign firms cross-listed in the U.S. and U.S. domestic companies. Finally, certain firm-, lawsuit-, and country-level characteristics can explain the degree of stock market reactions. The overall results provide evidence that private class action lawsuits in the U.S. have economically significant impact on cross-listed foreign issuers, thus playing an important role in overseeing and disciplining foreign companies.

  • (2012) Wang, Grace
    Thesis
    I study how investor sentiment affects the speed in which analysts issue their earnings forecasts. Based on psychological phenomena, I find that deviations from a steady level of economy-wide sentiment are associated with more timely analysts' earnings forecasts. I also find that analysts' earnings forecasts are more timely for firms with higher sentiment. However, I find that analysts' earnings forecasts are more timely only during bust periods. This is consistent with representativeness bias during periods of downturns. When analysts' earnings forecasts are decomposed into upwards and downwards forecast revisions, I find there are differences in the timeliness of upward and downward forecast revisions during boom and bust periods. I then examine the impact the timeliness of analysts' earnings forecasts has on the cost of equity capital. I find that as the timeliness of analysts' forecasts increases, the cost of equity capital reduces. However, there appears to be a maximum point where the most timely analysts' forecasts increase the cost of equity capital. My research provides evidence on analysts' information production processes during periods of both normal and extreme economy-wide sentiment.

  • (2012) Miller, Dianne
    Thesis
    This thesis seeks to demonstrate that, during the fixed charge years, Divisions 420, 820 and 855 Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (Cth) ( ITAA 97 ) are inconsistent with the object contained in s 3(a) of the Clean Energy Act 2011 (Cth) ( Clean Energy Act ). Section 3(a) states the Clean Energy Act was enacted to give effect to Australia s obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC ) and the Kyoto Protocol. Broadly, the obligations that arise under these agreements are the reduction of greenhouse gas ( GHG ) emissions. The Clean Energy Act introduces a GHG pricing mechanism commencing 1 July 2012. The mechanism has two distinct phases; the fixed charge years and the flexible charge years. There are three fixed charge years where the price of carbon is statutorily defined and operates like a tax. The mechanism adopts a carbon unit as the basis of operation during both phases. The thesis identifies that the mechanism introduced by the Clean Energy Act is inconsistent with s 3(a) Clean Energy Act during the fixed charge years due to the unlimited availability of carbon units and the inability to surrender units generated under the Kyoto Protocol. However, as obligations arising under the Kyoto Protocol are limited to the first commitment period (2008-2012), only fixed charge years were considered. Division 420 of the ITAA 97 was enacted to address the taxation treatment of carbon units. This thesis demonstrates that the operation of Division 420 does not provide an incentive to limit GHG emissions. This is principally due to the favourable taxation treatment of free carbon units. Free carbon units are generated through the Jobs and Competitiveness Program introduced by the Clean Energy Act. Free carbon units are allocated based on the entity s production levels. Therefore, incentives to hold free carbon units are inconsistent with a reduction of GHG emissions. In addition, this thesis identifies distortions that arise to the operation of Divisions 820 and 855 ITAA 97 resulting from the allocation of free carbon units. For foreign entities, these distortions amplify the favourable taxation treatment when free carbon units are held.

  • (2013) Liu, Yang
    Thesis
    This study investigates sentiment effects on stock returns and the role of information environments in 23 financial markets around the world. Consistent with prior studies, I find that investor sentiment negatively affects subsequent stock returns in global markets. Moreover, sentiment effects on market returns are much weaker in countries with higher information disclosures and better auditing standards, due to higher reliability and transparency of information thus less subjectivity of valuations in these countries. In addition, both the global and local component of investor sentiment has a negative and significant impact on future stock returns. There is also evidence that better information environments reduce the effects of local component of sentiment rather than the global component of investor sentiment.

  • (2010) Zhang, Boqi
    Thesis
    This thesis investigates the dynamics of trading behaviour and provides a comprehensive assessment of the overall performance of all Finnish retail and institutional investors over the years 1995 through 2004 using detailed transaction data on daily trades and investor identities. In contrast to prior published studies for Finland, this study reveals a significantly superior performance achieved by households over institutions in the longer run, either before or after the trading expenses. Despite much lower transaction costs, institutions trade several times as much as the most active household age group that reduces their net return as much as for households. I also find institutional trading is the key contributor to the volatility of Nokia share price. This study further examines the trading performance of individual investors across gender and age bands and documents both males and females in their thirties are the best performing traders among their respective gender groups on either a gross or net basis. In term of gender, male groups show significantly higher turnover while females hold higher-risk stocks. Frequent trading reduces men’s net return more so than do women in all age groups. The life cycle hypothesis does not seem to apply to Finnish working males nearing retirement after Nokia price crashed in 2000. This age group of 60 to 69 were net buyers of Nokia shares, and hence does not indicate a movement out of a high-risk investment into cash or bonds. I find strong evidence of correlated trading among household groups with young and middle-aged males sharing the highest cross correlations between their contemporaneous buy intensity. The level of correlated trading is surprisingly persistent and increases year by year. This finding suggests that profitable herding behaviour encourages more information sharing among households over time.

  • (2013) Xu, Jingrui
    Thesis
    Pension funds manage approximately 45% of US capital market equity capitalization, about US$7.1 trillion, and manage 55% of the Australian one, about US$0.65 trillion. Their yearly fee charges exceed US$100 billion. We ask whether US and Australian investors would earn, on average, higher net returns by investing in equity retirement funds than by investing in publicly traded passive index funds. We use twenty years of Morningstar data covering 8% and 23% of total pension assets in the US and Australia, respectively. We perform Sharpe Style analysis replicating pension funds styles by using Treasury assets and traded index funds. We find that both US and Australian investors who invest in actively managed equity pension funds would earn no higher net returns than those generated from the passive style-matching portfolios. Also, we do not find risk-adjusted abnormal returns of US equity pension funds, while we do find negative risk-adjusted abnormal returns of Australian equity pension funds, after controlling for risk using unconditional and conditional sensitivities to the Fama, French, and Carhart factors. Because ETFs (exchange-traded funds) were introduced relatively recently, sufficient data is not available for this study; ETF investments, with typically lower expense ratios, would have enhanced our results. As most retirement savings are compulsory and regulated, there are policy implications to governments, public and private employers, and pension savers. In particular, facilitating investing in traded passive index funds, or facilitating switching from actively managed pension funds to traded passive index funds would increase societal welfare by increasing retirement contribution values and might free significant human capital to productive ventures.

  • (2013) Motamarri, Saradhi
    Thesis
    Services in general and healthcare services in particular require proper planning and design so as to address patients concerns and improve outcomes. In this context, mobile phone s wide spread penetration coupled with its versatility is transforming it as a significant delivery channel for healthcare services. Mobile Health (mHealth- healthcare using mobile phones) is expected to enhance the access to healthcare especially, in the developing world. Following the House of Quality (HoQ) for service design, the literature search identified significant gaps in comparatively assessing mHealth with the other conventional services. Such an analysis is important for the large scale adoption of mHealth. To fill this gap, the current research has carried out a quantitative comparison of healthcare services, an important element of HoQ. The study explores the broad research questions: whether service alternatives are distinguishable from each other and if so, what factors contribute to the differentiation. A multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) is performed to understand patients perceptions of various healthcare services: public hospital (PH), general practitioner (GP), traditional medicine (TM) and B2C mHealth service in a developing country. Ubiquity, interaction quality and value have been identified to have significant influence on the patients attitude towards health care services. mHealth is perceived by the patients as far more easy to use, useful and valuable than other service alternatives. These insights are incorporated into the HoQ model for healthcare service design. mHealth is found to be an effective alternative to serve the developing world where populations are marginally deprived of even basic healthcare services. Theoretical and practical relevance of these findings are analysed and some directions are provided for future research.

  • (2012) Mo, Ce
    Thesis
    The concept of ICT/business alignment has been extensively discussed in the literature, but almost always in the context of large firms from the manufacturing and retailing industry. In addition, prior research has predominately conceptualized and operationalized ICT/business alignment at the firm level, very few attempts have been made to explore the issue at the process level. In this study, we developed an ICT alignment profile by adopting the value discipline theory to examine this concept from the business process perspective. Adopting the Resource Based View (RBV) and Contingency theory, a conceptual model that captures the antecedents of strategic ICT/business alignment, strategic alignment, and performance outcomes is proposed and empirically tested in the context of Australian professional conference organizers (PCO); Partial Least Square (PLS) was used for the data analysis. The contribution of this study is fourfold. First, ground in both RBV and Contingency theory, an integrative research model incorporating resources factors and contingency factors was developed to empirically assess the alignment between ICT and business strategy in the context of PCOs. Second, this study moves beyond the dominated firm level alignment paradigm by conceptualizing and evaluating the concept of alignment from the business process perspective, the process approach provided in-depth insights to the relationship between alignment and firm performance. Third, this study added the small firm perspective to strategic alignment literature in respect of antecedent to the alignment and its subsequent outcomes. Last but not least, this research also contributed to MICE literature by providing valuable insights as to the technology advancement in the business event industry in Australia.

  • (2013) Zhang, Yuyin
    Thesis
    This study examines volatility spillovers from developed markets of the United States and Japan to emerging markets in Asian-Pacific region during the period of two crises: 1997 Asian currency crisis and 2007 subprime credit crisis. Using recently developed bivariate multiplicative error model to examine volatility spillovers between the two stock markets, we find that the US market is more influential than the Japanese market for volatility transmissions to the Asian markets even though volatility spillovers from both the US and Japan to Asian countries are statistically significant. Additionally, the increasing spillovers of volatility from the US and Asian markets to Japan could be found as a result of the recent subprime financial crisis, while Japanese stock market is independent of other markets over the other three sub-periods. In addition, the volatility spillovers vary over time as they increase substantially after 1997 Asian currency crisis and their directions change dramatically after 2007 subprime credit crisis.