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The purpose of this paper is to examine the pricing efficiency of the Malaysian crude palm oil (CPO) market before and after the structural break. This study uses the daily closing price of CPO and CPO futures (CPO-F) for the period ranging from June 2009 to August 2016 while taking structural breaks into account.

In this study, symmetric and asymmetric long-run relationship model are employed, such as the Johansen cointegration, VECM, TAR and M-TAR models, to examine the impact of structural breaks on the pricing efficiency of the Malaysian CPO market.

This finding establish that Malaysian CPO price is efficient before and after the structural break. The consistent efficiency of the Malaysian CPO market supports the trading of the CPO-F in Globex and the use of Malaysian CPO pricing as the reference price. This study establishes that a structural break in the Malaysian CPO price series does not affect the pricing efficiency of the market.

This study shows that using Malaysian CPO price as a reference price is sustainable even in the event of a structural break. Therefore, market participants in the Malaysian CPO market have less to worry about the CPO price as it supports the weak form of efficiency. Price deviation in the short run may not lead to arbitrage profit as transaction cost may not be covered.

This study implies that if there is distortion in the price due to shocks, both manufacturers and producers need to hedge their positions in the futures market (subject to their positions in the underlying market). By entering into the futures market, pricing is locked in advance; hence, price risk is eliminated. Such a distortion could also affect the efficiency of the CPO price, therefore this study also addresses the issue of efficiency of the local CPO market.

Previous studies on Malaysian CPO pricing efficiency did not take the effect of structural break into consideration, making it difficult for these studies to show consistency in the efficiency of the Malaysian CPO market.

This study seeks to investigate the changes in stock market behavior between the pre and post internet/message board eras.

The study examines the stock return behavior for a large subset of firms in the S&P 100 both before and after the implementation of the firms' message boards on Yahoo! Finance.

The data shows a significant increase in daily trading volume after a firm's message board was established which suggests that either new investors were drawn to the market or existing investors were induced to trade more frequently. The results also show that daily returns are significantly lower in the post‐message board era and that the market may have become riskier as the variance of these daily returns is significantly higher. These results hold after controlling for market and industry wide events and they are not unique to the stock market bubble of the late 1990s or the NBER‐dated recession of 2001.

This study builds on the work of Asthana and connects it to the message board studies conducted by Tumarkin and Whitelaw, and Antweiler and Frank by considering whether or not the internet in general, and message boards specifically, may have changed the underlying behavior of the stock market. It has important implications for those researchers studying market information efficiency and confirms the importance of studying internet information use by investors.

We highlight key assumptions implicit in the models used by academics conducting research on market efficiency. Most notably, many academics assume that investors can borrow unlimited amounts and construct long-short portfolios at zero cost. We relax these assumptions and examine the attractiveness of long-short strategies as stand-alone investments and as a part of a diversified portfolio. Our analysis illustrates that the key benefit of long-short investing is adding diversification to a portfolio beyond what the market provides. We show that as stand-alone investments, nontrivial risk remains in the “hedge” strategies and that the returns generally do not beat the market in a head-to-head contest. Our findings raise questions about the degree of inefficiency in anomaly studies because plausible measures of costs generally offset strategy returns. The ability to achieve greater diversification may be, but is not necessarily, due to market inefficiency. We also highlight the key role of the generally ignored but critically important short interest rebate and show that absent this rebate, the long-short strategies we examine generally yield insignificant returns.

The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent economically significant stock return and volume changes on Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius Stock Exchanges (TSE, RSE, VSE) are contributable to public announcements disclosures and which types of announcements drive these.

Event‐study methodology was used to determine economically significant return and volume events.

It was found that 22‐37 per cent of return or volume events explained by public announcements was twice lower than reported in the UK. The greatest frequency of disclosures was attributable to financial disclosures as could be expected. Although, previous research indicates bigger magnitude of reaction to financial news, it was not observed in case of public announcements. Whereas, the magnitude of reactions on VSE was greater than reported on TSE and RSE, which indicates that VSE differs from TSE and RSE in its information processing.

Firstly, all other mediums of disclosure besides public announcements are excluded. Secondly, the focus on public announcements discards all other factors that could induce market reactions. Thirdly, investors are assumed to act rationally.

The relative importance of different news items in inducing market reactions on the three Baltic stock exchanges has not been previously investigated. Only one previous study has covered a developed capital market of the UK, which means that this paper enables to compare its results to the ones achieved in a developing capital market setting.

This study uses the unique setting of unusual market activity (UMA) replies to examine the market reaction and the effects of disclosure and investor protection amid information uncertainty.

A total of 1527 hand-collected UMA replies from the interlinked stock exchanges of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore for the period of 2015–2017 were analysed using event study and Heckman two-step methods with market and matched control firm benchmarks.

The overall results support the uncertain information hypothesis. The UMA replies with new information were also found to reduce information uncertainty, but not information asymmetry, and they are complementary to investor protection in enhancing abnormal returns. The overall finding suggests that the UMA public query system can be an effective market intervention mechanism in improving information certainty and efficiency.

This study provides insight on the effects of news replies and investor protection on abnormal returns, and support for the uncertain information hypothesis. The finding is useful to policymakers and stock exchanges as they seek to understand how to alleviate investors' anxiety and to create an informationally efficient market. Nevertheless, this study is limited by the extensiveness of the hand-collected UMA replies and also the potential issue of simultaneity-induced endogeneity.

This study uses UMA replies and cross-country data taking into account the effects of market surroundings such as information uncertainty and the level of investor protection on market reaction.

The purpose of this exploratory empirical study was to examine the link between effective marketing practices and business performance in the financial services industry. Based on a multi‐item construct of marketing effectiveness, data were generated from 52 banks and building societies. The effects of different marketing effectiveness dimensions upon profitability and growth as well as customer‐based performance indicators were investigated. Our results suggest that organisational variables such as customer philosophy, operational efficiency, marketing information and integrated marketing organisation are generally, significantly and positively associated with business performance. To conclude, managerial implications of the findings, study limitations and future research directions are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of dividend announcements on the stock return of Shariah-compliant and conventional stocks.

An event study methodology is applied to study the beta anomaly. Market-adjusted return model, mean-adjusted return model and market model have been applied to calculate excess returns. Estimation period used in this study is 130 days, and event period consists of 21 days in total, i.e. starting from the day –10 “before the cash dividend announcement” to day +10 “after the cash dividend announcements.

It has been concluded from the results that dividend plays an informational role in the Pakistan Stock Exchange. As the investors in Pakistan react favorably to the dividend increase announcements and unfavorably to the dividend decrease announcements, they consider dividend increase announcement as good news and dividend decrease announcement as bad news.

The findings of this study have several implications for different participants of the stock market, such as investors, academicians, researchers, fund managers and policymakers. They can use this information to make decisions while making efficient portfolios. Investors may get abnormal returns by focusing on the dividend announcement patterns. This can influence the attitude of investors toward efficient investments in the stock market and ultimately contribute to the betterment of society. This study is also beneficial for academicians and researchers, as it provides a comparative analysis of Shariah-compliant and conventional stocks and the anomalous effect of dividend announcements on stock return.

Limited research in the world’s context and null is available in Pakistani context on the subject matter. The comparative analysis of “Shariah-compliant” and “conventional” stocks provides insight into the asset pricing of Shariah-compliant stocks that have not been explored earlier. This study also uses three different methods (mean model, market model and market-adjusted return models) to compare Shariah-compliant and conventional stocks

The goal of this work is to evaluate how digital transformation disclosure in corporate news and press releases affects stock prices. We examine American and Chinese companies from the energy and industry sectors for two periods: pre-COVID-19 and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To estimate the effects of disclosure of information related to digital transformation, we applied the bag-of-words (BOW) method. As the benchmark dictionary, we used Kindermann et al. (2021), with the addition of original dictionaries created via Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis. We also employed panel regression analysis and random forest.

For USA energy sector, all aspects of digital transformation were insignificant in pre-COVID-19 period, while sustainability topics became significant during the pandemic. As for the Chinese energy sector, digital strategy implementation was significant in pre-pandemic period, while digital technologies adoption and business model innovation became relevant in COVID-19 period. The results show the greater significance of digital transformation aspects for industrials sectors compared to the energy sector. The result of random forest analysis proves the efficiency of the authors’ dictionary which could be applied in practice. The developed methodology can be considered relevant.

The research contributes to the existing literature in theoretical, empirical and methodological ways. It applies signaling and information asymmetry theories to the financial markets, digital transformation being used as an instrument. The methodological contribution of this article can be described in several ways. Firstly, our data collection process differs from that in previous papers, as the data are gathered “from investor’s point of view”, i.e. we use all public information published by the company. Secondly, in addition to the use of existing dictionaries based on Kindermann et al. (2021), with our own modifications, we apply the original methodology based on LDA analysis. The empirical contribution of this research is the following. Unlike past works, we do not focus on particular technologies (Hong et al., 2023) connected with digital transformation, but try to cover all multi-dimensional aspects of the transformational process and aim to discover the most significant one.

A composite sentiment index (CSI) from quantitative proxy sentiment indicators is likely to be a lag sentiment measure as it reflects only the information absorbed in the market. Information theories and behavioral finance research suggest that market prices may not adjust to all the available information at a point in time. This study hypothesizes that the sentiment from the unincorporated information may provide possible market leads. Thus, this paper aims to discuss a method to identify the un-incorporated qualitative Sentiment from information unadjusted in the market price to test whether sentiment polarity from the information can impact stock returns. Factoring market sentiment extracted from unincorporated information (residual sentiment or sentiment backlog) in CSI is an essential step for developing an integrated sentiment index to explain deviation in asset prices from their intrinsic value. Identifying the unincorporated Sentiment also helps in text analytics to distinguish between current and future market sentiment.

Initially, this study collects the news from various textual sources and runs the NVivo tool to compute the corpus data’s sentiment polarity. Subsequently, using the predictability horizon technique, this paper mines the unincorporated component of the news’s sentiment polarity. This study regresses three months’ sentiment polarity (the current period and its lags for two months) on the NIFTY50 index of the National Stock Exchange of India. If the three-month lags are significant, it indicates that news sentiment from the three months is unabsorbed and is likely to impact the future NIFTY50 index. The sentiment is also conditionally tested for firm size, volatility and specific industry sector-dependence. This paper discusses the implications of the results.

Based on information theories and empirical findings, the paper demonstrates that it is possible to identify unincorporated information and extract the sentiment polarity to predict future market direction. The sentiment polarity variables are significant for the current period and two-month lags. The magnitude of the sentiment polarity coefficient has decreased from the current period to lag one and lag two. This study finds that the unabsorbed component or backlog of news consisted of mainly negative market news or unconfirmed news of the previous period, as illustrated in Tables 1 and 2 and Figure 2. The findings on unadjusted news effects vary with firm size, volatility and sectoral indices as depicted in Figures 3, 4, 5 and 6.

The related literature on sentiment index describes top-down/ bottom-up models using quantitative proxy sentiment indicators and natural language processing (NLP)/machine learning approaches to compute the sentiment from qualitative information to explain variance in market returns. NLP approaches use current period sentiment to understand market trends ignoring the unadjusted sentiment carried from the previous period. The underlying assumption here is that the market adjusts to all available information instantly, which is proved false in various empirical studies backed by information theories. The paper discusses a novel approach to identify and extract sentiment from unincorporated information, which is a critical sentiment measure for developing a holistic sentiment index, both in text analytics and in top-down quantitative models. Practitioners may use the methodology in the algorithmic trading models and conduct stock market research.

The relationship between short selling, market volatility and liquidity remains an object of intensive research. However, empirical evidence is yet to provide a conclusive elucidation of this relationship by examining aspects of market fragmentation in the form of different market settings, different timing and different stocks under coverage, among others. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the impact of short selling on market volatility and liquidity in the Athens Exchange (ATHEX) under three different periods of short sales restrictions.

Two hypotheses are tested using econometric methodologies (co-integration and Granger-causality tools).

The empirical results indicate that when short selling is allowed, aggregate stock returns are in the short-term more volatile, but the liquidity of the market is not significantly affected. This might be the result of significant imbalances between supply and demand of stock caused by short-selling restrictions, leading to market price fluctuations.

The analysis of empirical evidence needs further expansion and association with institutional firm-level and country-level elements to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of short selling on market volatility and liquidity.

Stock market regulation involving short-selling restrictions have different implications according to extent and degree of stringency of the restrictions as well as the market on which they are imposed. That is especially important for the assessment of the market impact of the recent European Union regulation on short selling that has been imposed upon all EU member-States alike.

Financial regulation policy must balance the benefits and costs for retail investors of imposing short-selling restrictions on stock market trading.

First-time empirical evidence is provided on the impact of short selling regulations on market volatility and liquidity of ATHEX highlighting the potential effectiveness of regulation policy.