What's in a Name? : Evidence On Corporate Name Changes from the Australian Capital Market.

This paper takes a sample of Australian listed equities of companies which changed their name in the period 1/1/1990 to 31/12/1994. This sample known as the tota sample group. Two other samples were also formed based on whether the name change was major or minor, and whether at the time or around the time of the name change firms were engaged in corporate restructuring . The methodology employed is this paper is based on the weel known CAR technique but adjusted for 'thin' trading using the Scholes -Williams adjustment. This paper also tests the robstness of three forms of significance tests based on the standardising the abnormal returns, these are the patall adjustment, crude dependence adjustment and the cross sectional dependence technique.