英文摘要 |
Taiwan has legislated refraining insider trading in Taiwan’s Securities and Exchange Law since 1988. In May 2006, Taiwan’s Financial supervisory Commission (FSC) of the Executive Yuan issued the “Regulations Governing the Scope of Material Information and the Means of its Public Disclosure under Article 157-1, Paragraph 4, of the Securities and Exchange Law” to stipulate the scope of material information that is required to be disclosed for reducing insiders trading. According to this regulation, a company applying for initial listing is not included into the scope of “material information” in the stated SFC regulation. However, previous studies generally indicate listed firms have more opportunities in raising capital than private enterprises. In addition, better market liquidity for listed firms can expect positive rewards from stock prices. Therefore, applying for going public is a major economic affair in its nature. In this paper, we investigate the possibility that a company’s insiders use private information to make abnormal profits under current regulations. The event study is used to examine stock return occurred before applying for initial listing. The “lump sum method” and the “trade to trade method” are employed to adjust the low liquidity of emerging stock market. Under the “lump sum method”, our results show that average abnormal return in the estimate period and in the event period were 0.13% and 0.28% respectively. The difference between two periods was not zero and reached the statistical significance at confidence level of 1%. During the event period of 60 days, the daily average positive abnormal return reach the significance level of 10% in 5 days, 5% in 8 days, and 1% in 1 day; During event period, accumulated positive abnormal return reach significance levels in 53 days out of 60 days, and since the 45th days prior to the application date the returns reach the significance level of 1%. Under the trade to trade method, the results are more significant than under the lump sum method. During event period, daily average positive abnormal return reach significance level of 10% in 9 days out of 60 days, 5% in 15 days, 1% in 6 days. Similarly, accumulated positive abnormal return also reach significance levels during the event period, and from the 56th day prior to the applying date the returns have reached a significance level of 1% (except for the 53rd day prior to the application date, which reaches a significance level of 5%). This paper is the first study to observe the emerging stock price affected by the application for initial listing. Our results show that the application for initial listing exhibits positive information value. We further find significant positive abnormal stock returns prior to the application for initial listing, presumably caused by the insider trading. Our paper provides empirical evidence for government authority in re-formulating regulations concerning the scope of “material information” which is required to be disclosed for reducing insider trading. |