This timely volume addresses three important recent trends in the internationalization of United States equity markets: extensive market integration through foreign investment and links among stock prices around the world; increasing securitization as countries such as Japan come to rely more than ever before on markets in equities and bonds at the expense of banks; and the opening of national financial systems of newly industrializing countries to international financial flows and institutions, as governments remove capital controls and other barriers. Eight essays examine such issues as the current extent of international market integration, gains to U.S. investors through international diversification, home-country bias in investing, the role of time and location around the world in stock trading, and the behavior of country funds. Other, long-standing questions about equity markets are also addressed, including market efficiency and the accuracy of models of expected returns, with a particular focus on variances, covariances, and the price of risk according to the Capital Asset Pricing Model.

How to prevent runs on open-end mutual funds? In recent years, markets have observed an innovation that changed the way open-end funds are priced. Alternative pricing rules (known as swing pricing) adjust funds’ net asset values to pass on funds’ trading costs to transacting shareholders. Using unique data on investor transactions in U.K. corporate bond funds, we show that swing pricing eliminates the first-mover advantage arising from the traditional pricing rule and significantly reduces redemptions during stress periods. The positive impact of alternative pricing rules on fund flows reverses in calm periods when costs associated with higher tracking error dominate the pricing effect.

The practical guide to finding value and opportunity in large-cap stocks using investor behavior Large-Cap is an abbreviation of the term "large market capitalization" and refers to the stock of publicly traded companies with market capitalization values of roughly more than $10 billion, like Walmart, Microsoft, and Ford. Because of their size, the conventional view is that these companies do not present investors with an ability to be opportunistic. The Large-Cap Portfolio + Website argues that, contrary to popular perceptions, significant opportunities exist in these stocks. Written with a fluency that both the savvy amateur and professional investor will understand, the book fills a void in the market by offering the practitioner a methodology to identify and approach the major assumptions that underlie valuation, with an emphasis on issues that are more relevant to the analysis of large-cap stocks. Full of useful information on how to reap the rewards of stocks that most investors avoid Presents essential insights into understanding stock valuation Includes an actionable chapter devoted to portfolio management Packed with timely instruction, Large-Cap Portfolio gives readers invaluable insights and examples of how to build portfolios that will out-perform broad market benchmarks.

"Closed-End Funds, Exchange-Traded Funds, and Hedge Funds: Origins, Functions, and Literature is a concise and valuable book that will be of interest to individual investors, financial professionals, and academic researchers, alike. It provides a brief history and institutional discussion of these investment companies and also presents a summary of the research on these funds. Investment practitioners will find the book useful as a reference and as a quick refresher on the current state of knowledge regarding each fund type. Equally important, it provides academic researchers with an accurate institutional framework within which to cast their theoretical models, and a point of departure for expanding the empirical analysis for improving our understanding of these funds. All-in-all, this is a very valuable book; I highly recommend it." (John J. Jackson, Professor of Economics, Auburn University) "Professors Anderson, Born, and Schnusenberg provide a valuable service in this monograph. The practical significance of closed-end funds, exchange-traded funds, and hedge funds has increased dramatically in recent years, but all too many academics and investors know little about them. This text presents a carefully-focused and understandable description of these investment vehicles, highlighting the big, unresolved questions, while also including careful and fair accounts of the state of the literature. Nothing extraneous clutters the presentation, but, more importantly, nothing necessary is left out. Highly recommended." (T. Randolph Beard, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Auburn University) "This book is both useful as a reference book and as an additive, educational overview of ETFs and hedge funds, as well as CEFs. In today’s tumultuous markets, much reference is made to these subjects without a clear understanding of the vehicles, their structure and their history. This is a very timely publication and should be viewed as an important read. The book contains definitive explanations and also includes an excellent summary of past works in this area. Readable, informative and highly useful as a reference source." (Kathleen A. Wayner, President and CEO, Bowling Portfolio Management)

The efficient markets hypothesis has been the central proposition in finance for nearly thirty years. It states that securities prices in financial markets must equal fundamental values, either because all investors are rational or because arbitrage eliminates pricing anomalies. This book describes an alternative approach to the study of financial markets: behavioral finance. This approach starts with an observation that the assumptions of investor rationality and perfect arbitrage are overwhelmingly contradicted by both psychological and institutional evidence. In actual financial markets, less than fully rational investors trade against arbitrageurs whose resources are limited by risk aversion, short horizons, and agency problems. The book presents and empirically evaluates models of such inefficient markets. Behavioral finance models both explain the available financial data better than does the efficient markets hypothesis and generate new empirical predictions. These models can account for such anomalies as the superior performance of value stocks, the closed end fund puzzle, the high returns on stocks included in market indices, the persistence of stock price bubbles, and even the collapse of several well-known hedge funds in 1998. By summarizing and expanding the research in behavioral finance, the book builds a new theoretical and empirical foundation for the economic analysis of real-world markets.

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine various problems in financial economics. Chapter 1 fills in a gap in the IPO literature by documenting a close connection between IPO underpricing and the long-term underperformance of IPOs. Firms going public in periods of low underpricing do not underperform in the long run, while firms going public in high underpricing periods do. Furthermore, IPOs in later stages of high underpricing periods underperform even relative to their offer prices, which suggests that many of the most "underpriced" IPOs are in fact priced above fundamental value. This result is unlikely to be explained by differences in risk, or to be driven by a peso problem. I also find that firms going public in later stages of high underpricing periods display worse operating performance and profitability, lower asset growth, lower investment rates and higher cash holdings. Finally, I provide evidence that investor sentiment is stronger in high-underpricing periods. These results are consistent with a setting in which low quality firms, in periods in which the average underpricing in the market is high, try to exploit investors' sentiment by going public. Chapter 2 looks at the return predictability information in Single Country Closed-End Fund (SCCEF) discounts. It is long argued that discounts in closed-end funds are caused by differences in sentiment between investors that trade the fund and investors that trade the underlying assets. SCCEFs provide an interesting setting given the clear market segmentation. American SCCEFs are priced by American investors, while underlying assets are mainly traded by investors in the respective country. I argue that if cross-sectional and time-series variation in SCCEFs are linked to differences in sentiment, then the SCCEF discount can be used to predict future performance of SCCEFs, international stock markets, or both. The evidence on international stock markets' return predictability using SCCEF discounts is mixed. A trading strategy designed to exploit potential differences in sentiment by buying and selling international stock indices delivers alphas of around 90bps per month in an International CAPM. Adding three extra factors: value, size and momentum in U.S. equity does not change the result. However, once we control for international value and momentum in stock markets, we no longer observe positive alphas for short-horizon investments. The evidence on SCCEF return predictability from SCCEF discounts is very strong. For all three asset pricing models considered, a strategy that exploits differences in sentiment yields positive alphas, with magnitudes ranging from 2% to 4% per month. In Chapter 3, I investigate how the stock market reacts to earnings surprises announced during major sport events in the U.S. In a rational and frictionless market, investors should not react differently to announcements released during sport events. However, major sport events combine two known psychological biases. First, sports can be distracting, impairing investors' judgment. Second, sports can change people's mood. Hence, through these biases, market prices could be affected. Considering the Super Bowl, World Series of Baseball and NBA finals I find that investors, immediately after sport events, underreact to positive surprises, and overreact to negative surprises in earnings. After this initial reaction, I find that, investors undo their 'mistakes' in the following weeks to the announcement. However, for the most negative and positive surprises, they over-compensate. In this study, I show that non relevant financial events have an impact on market prices. Moreover, I show that the observed impact cannot be explained only by limited attention, as investor mood seems to be crucial to explain investors' reactions.