This paper extends to Japanese stocks recent research on short-term stock price adjustment to new information. Using standard methodologies, we find that stock returns of firms included in the Nikkei 300 tend to be significantly positive after large price decreases. This is similar to the pattern observed for American stocks in other research. The pattern remains when returns are adjusted for market movements, and exists independently of the October 1987 market break. We find little evidence of significant patterns following large stock price increases. We also find little evidence that non-transaction prices explain the persistent, significant returns observed following large price decreases on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. We conjecture that broker/dealers and TSE member firms respond to large price decreases not by trading for their own profit, but rather by selectively supplying liquidity to their preferred retail customers. We conclude that ordinary investors probably cannot earn economic profits from these statistically significant patterns.

We examine stock price behavior in response to initial coverage, buy recommendations that are pre-released to important clients before the stock market opens, and find a strong positive valuation effect at the open. On average, it takes five minutes of trading for NYSE/AMEX stocks and 15 minutes for NASDAQ stocks to reflect the private information contained in these analyst recommendations, so when informational asymmetry is high, the centralized call market is more efficient than a competitive, but fragmented dealer market. Public news release leaves share prices unaltered. Overall, competition among informed traders causes private information to be rapidly incorporated into stock prices.

Citizens Utilities Company (CU), Stamford, CT, has two classes of common stock, one paying cash dividends and one paying stock dividends. Unless CU shareholders ignore dividend taxation, the price of the cash dividend shares should increase relative to the stock dividend shares after the 1986 tax change. Contrary to this hypothesis, we find that the relative valuation of these two classes of shares was not permanently affected by the tax change. We do observe a pricing change around the time of the tax reform, but the effect is only temporary—the relative valuation before the tax change (1982–1984) and after (1987–1989) is almost equal. Two possible explanations for the observed valuation of the two stocks are clientele effects and differences in liquidity. We find that neither of these explanations can account for the relative pricing of the shares.

This paper develops a corporate bond valuation model that takes into account both early default and interest rate risk. It corrects a defect of recent contributions where pricing equations do not assure that the payment to bondholders upon bankruptcy is no greater than firm value. The bankruptcy-triggering mechanism is directly related to the payoff received by bondholders when early bankruptcy is forced upon the firm. More specifically, the default barrier is defined simply as a fixed quantity discounted at the riskless rate up to the maturity date of the risky corporate bond. As soon as this threshold is crossed, bondholders receive an exogenously specified fraction of the remaining assets. Deviations from the absolute priority rule also are captured. Because it accounts for Gaussian interest rate uncertainty, default risk, and deviations from the absolute priority rule, this model is capable of producing quite diverse shapes for the term structure of yield spreads.

We extend the market microstructure literature by examining trading strategies of a small discretionary liquidity trader in call and continuous markets. Our investigation of trading strategies uses intraday market and limit orders, and introduces the market-at-open order as an alternative strategy for a small liquidity trader. We find that a small trader can reduce transaction costs by trading at the opening. Using tick-by-tick transaction data, we demonstrate that the market-at-open order consistently produces better prices than market and limit orders executed during the trading day.

Recent models of herding suggest that speculators may rationally trade on information unrelated to fundamentals when their trading horizons are short. This study provides an empirical example where this appears to be the case. Johnson Redbook's weekly retail sales figures predicted bond returns for a short time after a significant number of bond traders began purchasing and trading on the data. The significant relationship between the data and bond returns disappeared just after the Wall Street Journal started to report it. Meanwhile, there was little or no change in the relationship between the data and retailers' stock returns, perhaps because the data have long been followed by retail stock analysts, Johnson Redbook's original investor clientele.