This paper examines the determinants of inside spreads and their behaviour around corporate earning announcement dates, for a sample of UK firms over the period 1986-94. The paper finds that closing daily inside spreads are affected by order processing costs (proxied by trading volumes),...

The excess volatility approach to testing the rational expectations-efficient markets hypothesis has focused on the time series properties of an aggregate stock market index. In this paper, the authors examine another dimension of volatility and study cross-section data on the stock market...

Previous work on U.K. pension funds found only slight evidence of fund manager persistence but survivorship bias in the construction of these data samples may have disguised true persistence. Using a large sample of pension funds over the period 198397 in which there is less survivorship bias,...

This paper is about learning. It illustrates how in a two period allocation problem with uncertainty in each period, an economic agent's decisions are influenced by the knowledge that he is able to learn about the uncertainty. The time periods are linked through the learning process of the...

We document that the observed persistence amongst the worst performing actively managed mutual funds is attributable to funds that have performed poorly both in the current and prior year. We demonstrate that this persistence results from an unwillingness of investors in these funds to respond...

Signalling models of IPO underpricing argue that owners of high-quality firms signal firm quality by underpricing shares sold at the IPO and retaining a large equity stake because they benefit from IPO signalling by selling further shares in the aftermarket at a higher share price. This...

This paper constructs a time series of annuity rates in the U.K. for 1957-2002, and examines the pricing of U.K. annuities, and the relationship between the accumulation and decumulation phases of a defined contribution pension scheme by focusing on the properties of the pension replacement...

This paper aims to assess the impact of the abolition of U.K. exchange control on the degre of integration of U.K. and overseas stock markets. Using cointegration techniques, we find that although there is no significant increase in the correlation of short-run stock market returns for the...

This paper examines the relationship between executive cash compensation and company performance for a sample of large UK companies over the period 1994-2002. This relationship is examined against a background of a series of reports into corporate governance mechanisms in UK companies. We show...