We examine pairs of large, Siamese twin' companies whose stocks are traded around the world but have different trading and ownership habitats. Twins pool their cashflows so, with integrated markets, twin stocks should move together. In contrast, the relative prices of twin stocks appear correlated with the markets where they are traded most, i.e., a twin's relative price rises when the market on which it is relatively intensively traded rises. We examine several explanations for this phenomenon: discretionary uses of dividend income by parent companies; differences in parent expenditures; voting rights issues; currency fluctuations; ex-dividend-date timing issues; and tax-induced investor heterogeneity. Only that latter hypothesis can explain some (but not all) of the facts. Other possible explanations include: i) country-specific sentiment shocks affect share price movements of locally-traded stocks in proportion to their local trading/ownership intensity, and ii) investors are rational, but markets are segmented by frictions other than international transactions costs, such as agency problems.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
6572.
Length: Date of creation: May 1998 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6572
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Gikas Hardouvelis & Rafael La Porta & Thierry A. Wizman, 1994.
"What Moves the Discount on Country Equity Funds?,"
NBER Chapters,
in: The Internationalization of Equity Markets, pages 345-403
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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