Essays in international finance (China, Japan)

This paper consists of two separate projects: (1) The investor protection and dividend policy in China, (2) Price momentum in Japan.; In Chapter 1, we investigate the shareholder and creditor protection and look into the dividend policy implement in the stock market. The investor protection was analyzed based on the China company law and our result shows that the shareholder (creditor) protection is weak (strong) compared with the rest of the world. In China, a firm can issue as many as five different classes of shares: state shares, legal person shares, A-shares, foreign shares and employee shares. Under the weak shareholder protection in China, A-shareholders are categorized to the disadvantage group in corporate structure which demonstrates the classic free-rider problem. With the expertise and knowledge to monitor the management, controlling legal person not only enhance the corporate performance, but also expecting dividend payout as the reward. In our study, we have strong evidence on the legal person share ownership positively related to the dividend payout decision, while the A-shares and state shares ownership are negatively related to the decision on dividend payout.; The Japanese stock market provide a reasonable setting for studying intermediate-horizon price momentum effect, because Japan has the largest equity market aside from the U.S. in terms of both capitalization and number of securities. In Chapter 2, by measuring the relative strength of portfolio on the Japanese market, we found that the price momentum does not exist in the Japanese market. Further, the momentum returns keep always negative on any horizon, which is coherent in keiretsu and non-keiretsu grouping and in different trading volume. The decomposition on the expected average returns of different investment period in Japanese market shows that the price reversals is not capable to overwhelm the losses from the cross-sectional differences in mean returns and cannot yield statistically significant net momentum profits in the Japanese market.