Three Essays In Cross-Border Finance

This Ph.D. dissertation investigates various areas in financial economics: market microstructure, corporate finance, asset pricing, and financial econometrics. The three comprising essays have a common ground: cross-border finance. Chapter One documents the impact of differential private information on relative asset pricing across borders by studying the probability of informed trading (PIN) for Canadian shares traded on exchanges separated by Niagara Falls. Relative to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) has more informed trades and accounts for a larger information share, indicating that informed traders contribute to cross-border price discovery. The information imbalance across the two markets is associated with small but positive price premiums for New York trades. The dynamics of these premiums depends on trade informedness. Lastly, the PIN of a TSX -listed share typically rises upon cross-listing on the NYSE, which is consistent with negative abnormal returns of the original listing. The theory of corporate governance suggests that managers of poorly governed firms are more likely to make poor investment decisions, and the evidence on high antitakeover provision (ATP) firms is consistent. In Chapter Two, I study the effect of domestic and foreign takeovers by U.S. firms and find that high-ATP bidders tend to pay relatively high premiums for either targets. While this suggests that these firms make poor decisions, high-ATP bidders also experience relatively high event study returns at times of foreign takeover news. This contradicts the findings of Masulis et al. (2007) for domestic takeovers. Finally, Chapter Three explores the convergence between the prices of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) listed by Asia-Pacific firms and their original shares listed on home exchanges. Instead of relying on conventional parametric approaches that carry embedded model-specification errors, I contribute to the literature by introducing a nonparametric technique to estimate the convergence speed parameter. I present the time-varying characteristics of both firm and country-level convergence speed parameters. Furthermore, I empirically verify and visually corroborate the comparative dynamics of convergence with respect to short sales restrictions, trading time differences, and market-tier measures proxied by the Morgan Stanley Capital International indices. I conclude that enhancement in market efficiency accelerates the reversion to the parity of ADR -pairs