The literature presents evidence that bidding firms acquiring privately held targets earn positive and higher abnormal returns on M&A announcements than those acquiring publicly traded firms (Chang, 1998; Hansen and Lott, 1996; Fuller, Netter, and Stegemoller, 2002; Moeller, Schlingemann, and Stulz, 2004; Faccio, McConnell, and Stolin, 2006). Faccio et al. (2006) refer to this phenomenon as the “listing effect” in acquirers’ announcement period stock returns. Some literature on the Korean data claims that the listing effect on acquirers’ returns is also found in the Korean stock market (Kim and Seo, 2000; Oh and Song, 2008; Jung, 2010). For example, using the sample of merger announcements in the Korean stock market over the 1980 to 2007 period, Jung (2010) examines the cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) of acquirers’ stocks for 10 days from -5 to 5 surrounding announcements of merger deals and finds that bidders acquiring a publicly traded company have an average CAR of 0.13%, which is not statistically different from zero, whereas bidders acquiring a privately held company have an average CAR of 3.71%, which is significantly different from zero. Jung (2010) also shows that the average CARs of the two groups are significantly different from each other at the 1% level. Chang (1998) provides three explanations for the listing effect on acquirers’ returns: the limited competition hypothesis, the monitoring hypothesis, and the information hypothesis. The limited competition hypothesis states that if the competition for private firms in the takeover market is limited, bidders can experience positive abnormal stock returns because the likelihood of underpayment is high. The monitoring hypothesis is related to the concentrated ownership of private firms. Private firms are typically held by a small number of shareholders. Therefore, when a bidder acquires a private firm through common stock exchange, the shareholders of the private target firm can become outside blockholders after the merger and may then become active monitors who contribute positively to firm value. Lastly, the information hypothesis explains the listing effect on acquirers’ returns through the mitigation of information asymmetry. The relatively few shareholders of a private target firm have incentives to actively assess the prospect of a bidding company, and their willingness to hold the shares of the bidder conveys favorable information about the bidder to the market. The main purpose of this paper is to revisit the listing effect on acquirers’ returns in the Korean stock market because prior studies on this issue do not explicitly separate the effect of backdoor listing (reverse takeover) from the listing effect on acquirers’ returns. Backdoor listing means that a private firm merges with a listed firm and becomes public without going through an official IPO process. Many papers report that listed firms engaging in backdoor listing experience positive abnormal returns upon the announcement of the deal (Gleason, Rosenthal, and Wiggins, 2005: Park, Park and Bae, 2009; Kang, 2009; Kang and Kim, 2009). We refer to this phenomenon as the backdoor listing effect. In addition, Gleason et al. (2005) and Park et al. (2009) find that listed firms in backdoor listing are typically small and poor performers. Even though a private firm essentially acquires a listed firm in the backdoor listing process, on the surface, the listed firm survives and maintains its listing status throughout the merger process. When Korean listed firms file disclosure documents regarding backdoor listings with the Korean financial supervisory [Please check whether this should be “Korean financial supervisory.”], they classify themselves as acquirers and the essentially acquiring private firms as targets. Therefore, unless researchers pay particular attention, it is likely that backdoor listings are mistakenly treated as the mergers of private firms with public firms. If the sample of mergers of private firms includes backdoor listings, the results on the listing effect on acquirers’ returns can be misleading. To address this concern, our study manually identifies backdoor listings among merger announcements and investigates the listing effect on acquirers’ returns with and without the backdoor listing effect. We find that the cumulative abnormal returns are higher for acquirers of private targets than for acquirers of public targets only when we include backdoor listings in the sample of mergers of private firms. Excluding backdoor listings, we do not find that the listing status of target firms plays a significant role in acquirers’ returns in merger announcements. Using multivariate tests to control various firm and deal characteristics, we also find that a target firm’s listing status does not affect acquirers’ returns, whereas backdoor listing has a significant impact on acquirers’ returns. We perform robustness tests, considering the change in the regulation on the disclosure of backdoor listing and the monitoring effect of new blockholders, and find that the result of the non-existence of the listing effect remains the same. Therefore, the findings of our study suggest that the backdoor listing effect may have resulted in the erroneous conclusion by prior studies that a listing effect on acquirers’ returns exists in the Korean stock market.

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This paper studies the benefit of business group affiliation using the unique dataset of firms that are acquired by Korean chaebols in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. To establish the causality that group affiliation causes changes in performance of affiliated firms, the study employs firms that were once nonchaebol, but later acquired by chaebols and became newly affiliated to chaebols. The analyses focuses on the Asian financial crisis that represents high external capital market frictions to bolster the argument for the group affiliation benefit. Panel regressions show that the acquired firms improve performance after acquisitions. Moreover, to address a potential concern that firm-specific characteristics may explain post-acquisition performance of the acquired firms, I match the acquired firms with nonchaebol firms with respect to pre-acquisition characteristics. The matching estimator shows that the new chaebol firms outperform the control firms after chaebol acquisitions. Cross-sectional tests reveal that the affiliation benefit is more pronounced within larger firms and firms with higher ultimate ownership of the controlling families. Finally, the new firms expand market shares and gain stronger pricing power after being group-affiliated, which sheds light on the bright side of group affiliation such as sharing group reputation and internal capital markets.

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This paper investigates the dynamic price movements of cryptocurrency market in Korea by employing asymmetric DCC multivariate GARCH and risk decomposition model to reflect the time-varying integration process. We find that the law of one price does not hold between Korean and developed markets like U.S. and Japan, implying that emerging cryptocurrency market can be exploited as a scapegoat of arbitragers. Specifically, the price spreads of 20 to 30 percent between BTC-KRW and BTC-USD persist, exhibiting a sign of economic speculative bubble in Korean cryptocurrency market. Additionally, while there are significant price and volatility spillover effects between cryptocurrency markets of U.S. and Japan, the feedback effects do not exist in the case of Korean market. Our analyses also indicate that the pricing in Korea is mostly based on domestic factors rather than global factors. Finally, we show that this arbitrage opportunity in Korean market has disappeared after a government regulation, which includes banning foreigners and minors from opening new cryptocurrency accounts and prohibiting initial coin offerings (ICOs). The results suggest that a suitable regulation is important to eliminate bubbles.

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A startup may have little track record and investors may not have the exact information about an entrepreneur’s true success probability. To model this, we consider a patent signaling model for startup financing where the entrepreneur signals his type by acquiring patents at his own cost and investors have coarse information about the entrepreneur’s true success probability. Rather than having the exact information about each type’s true success probability, investors only perceive the ranges of the entrepreneur’s possible success probabilities. Adopting perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE) as a solution concept, we consider only pure-strategy separating and pooling PBEs of the signaling game between the entrepreneur and investors. By invoking an extension of Cho and Kreps’ (1987) Intuitive Criterion adapted to our model, we obtain the unique least-cost perfect Bayesian equilibrium. In the refined equilibrium, as investors consider a higher success probability of each type, it takes more equity share. Furthermore, a high-type entrepreneur may get a smaller equity share despite of acquiring a higher level of patent than in the benchmark where investors know the exact possible success probabilites of the entrepreneur. This implies that coarse information faced by investors may lead to less effective patent-signaling than in the benchmark.

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This study investigates whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) alone sufficiently alleviates the problem of inefficient investment or not? This study considers firms registered on the Shanghai Exchange (China), Korean Exchange (South Korea)and Tokyo Exchange (Japan) for the period 2012 to 2016. Key findings are as follows. First, higher levels of CSR engagement have a positive role in alleviating investment inefficiency. Second, national culture plays a moderating role in the relationship between CSR and investment inefficiency for the entire sample. However, for China, national culture did not play any moderating role (weak culture). Korean national culture displays a partially moderating role (partially strong culture). Japan emerged as the strongest national culture because of the strong moderating role of its national culture. Third, information asymmetry has a mediating role between CSR and inefficient investment by solving the problem of underinvestment. Fourth, agency cost plays a mediating role between CSR engagement and inefficient investment by overcoming the problem of overinvestment. It concludes that CSR engagement alone is not sufficient for alleviating inefficient investment. However, the relationship between CSR and inefficient investment is explained more effectively, through the moderating effect of national culture and the mediating effect of information asymmetry and agency cost.

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If we can estimate the level of private information that has flowed into the capital market as a statistic, it can be very useful in many related fields. The first example is the probability of information-based trading (PIN) of Easley and O’Hara (1987). However, the structural model, PIN, has been criticized since the mid 2000s for not reflecting the data characteristics of the stock market, which has been turned into a surge of high frequency trading (HFT). Then, Duarte and Young (2009) proposed a modified PIN model, which extends the PIN model to overcome its shortcomings, and Odders-White and Ready (2008) suggested a model which is based on a fully different theoretical approach. This paper examines the validity of PIN, adjusted PIN (AdjPIN), and Odders-White and Ready (OWR), which have been extensively used as private information measures, in the Korean stock market. Applying them to the information asymmetry situation of the securities market before and after the merger announcement, we verify whether the estimates of these models are appropriate as private information measures. For this, we use the “Conditional Probability of an Information Event (CPIE)” of Duarte, Hu, and Young (2015, 2017). CPIE is estimated by model to enable to judge whether the private information reaches the market on a daily basis. The analyses in this paper include 29 cases of merger disclosures for the targeted companies listed on the KOSPI Market over an eight-and-a-half year period (2007. 5~2015. 10). We employ regression analysis, comparison between CPIE and its expected value, and the CPIE determinants analysis using the TAQ data for a total of 340 trading days before and after each event. As a result, only the OWR model among the three models appears to be useful as a measure of private information in the Korean securities market. Although there are differences in detail, this is essentially the same result as the US stock market. It suggests that in the Korea stock market, the OWR model based on orderflow imbalance, and day and over-night returns, is more appropriate as a measure of private information, rather than the PIN / AdjPIN model. The more detailed results are as follows. First, as a result of CPIE determinants analysis, the PIN-model-based CPIE is affected mostly by trade turnover and somewhat by order imbalance, while the AdjPIN-model-based CPIE is affected by trade turnover. Accordingly, the PIN/AdjPIN models are affected mainly by trade turnover, rather than order imbalance, on which they are theoretically based. On the other hand, most of the explanatory power of the OWR-model-based CPIE comes from over-night and intraday returns. The OWR-model-based CPIE reflects information consistent with its theoretical rationale, although it contrasts somewhat with the U.S. stock market, which is much more affected by either overnight return (in regression analysis) or intra-day return (in the comparison analysis between CPIE and its predicted value). Second, the PIN-/AdjPINmodel- based CPIEs are estimated at the boundary values 0 or 1 at least 81% of the time due to numerical overflow problems in the parameter estimation. This makes PIN or AdjPIN measurements more difficult to trust, even if the models are valid. Third, in all three models, the CPIE persists for up to 5~6 trading days after the announcement of the merger. However, after the announcement, the pattern shows a gradual decline to a lower level than before the announcement. Also, in all three models, the CPIE peaks one day after the announcement, rather than on the day of the announcement. This reflects a degree of inefficiency in the Korean stock market. Altogether, these results suggest that, among the PIN, AdjPIN, and OWR models, the OWR model best reflects the private information flow in the Korean stock market. In other words, they suggest that the OWR model based on order flow imbalance, over-night return, and intraday return, rather than the PIN/AjdPIN models based on order flow imbalance, is more appropriate as a measure of private information. The results on the Korean stock market are essentially the same as those of the U.S. stock market, though there are differences in detail, such as the relative importance of overnight and intraday returns.

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This study analyzes the mean reversion of trading volume, which allows us to predict future trading volumes from time-series data. The results have important implications for various related concerns, including the predictability of returns in relation to trading volumes, liquidity, and the use of practical indicators such as the VWAP (volume-weighted average price) and the CGO (capital gains overhang). We test the trading volumes of the indices, size-portfolios, and individual stocks on the Korean stock market from 1999 to 2017. All of the sample data are obtained from FnDataGuide. First, we test the autocorrelation of the trading volume. The results show that the trading volume has a positive autocorrelation, and that changes in trading volume have negative autocorrelations. Therefore, we confirm that the trading volume process (unlike the return process) does not follow an independent distribution. As mean reversion implies a correlated time-series, the autocorrelation of trading volumes serves as the premise for the mean reversion of trading volumes. Next, we use the Phillips-Perron test (Phillips and Perron, 1988) and the KPSS test (Kwiatkowski, Phillips, Schmidt, and Shin, 1992) to verify the mean reversion property of the trading volume. The results show that the trading volume of the indices, size-portfolios, and 96% of the individual stocks, all have a mean reversion property on the Korean stock market. In addition, we calculate the mean-reverting speed for each stock by applying the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model (Uhlenbeck and Ornstein, 1930) to identify the variables that affect the mean reversion property of the trading volume. We regard the mean-reverting speed as a proxy variable that indicates the relative strength of the mean reversion property across sample stocks. This analysis of the mean-reverting speed enables us to confirm which variables affect the mean reversion of the trading volume. Before the regression analysis, we compare the actual mean-reverting duration of the trading volume with the duration calculated by using the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model, which is our model for estimating the mean-reverting duration of the trading volume. As the implied error of the model has an acceptable scale, we confirm that our Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model can serve as a reasonable model for trading volume. The regression results on the mean-reverting speed of each stock shows that the smaller the size, the smaller the stock price volatility. In addition, we find that the smaller the ratio of the individual investors’ trading activity and the higher the number of analysts’ reports, the higher the mean-reverting speed. This set of findings suggests that the mean reversion of the trading volume can be explained by the presence of stealth trading (Kyle, 1985; Admati and Pfleiderer, 1988; Foster and Viswanathan, 1990; Wang, 1994) and by individual investors' attention-based trading (Barber and Odean, 2008). Heterogeneity between investors generates trading volume. This heterogeneity is resolved by opinion-sharing with trades. However, stealth trading by informed investors delays the incorporation of information, and attention-based trading by individual investors gives the trading volume a positive feedback. Thus, the mean-reverting speed of a stock is slower in trading environments where it is easier to hide information, and where individual investors trade more actively. Additionally, we show that the future trading volume can be estimated from its mean-reversion property. If we know the mean-reverting speed, the mean value, and the standard deviation of the trading volume, we can obtain the expected trading volume by applying the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model. This study contributes to the literature in the following four ways. First, and most importantly, it expands research on trading volumes by demonstrating that the volume has a mean reversion property on the Korean stock market. Understanding this property takes us one step beyond making predictions based on the autocorrelation of the trading volume. Second, we find that the future trading volume can be predicted by its mean reversion property. This novel finding helps to expand the knowledge of market dynamics among academics, and it can help practitioners who want to build their positions without causing a serious market impact. Third, we show that the trading volume has a positive autocorrelation in the Korean stock market. Although such autocorrelation of trading volume has been previously studied in the U.S. stock market, it has not been investigated in the Korean stock market. As the scope for applying autocorrelation is wide, we believe that the verification of autocorrelation is also important. Last, we shed light on why the trading volume shows mean-reversion properties. We assess trade sizes, price volatility, the trading activity of individual investors, and the number of analysts’ earnings estimates, all of which influence the mean reversion of the trading volume. All of these factors can be partly explained by stealth trading and the attention-based trading of individual investors.

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The continuous increase in household debt in Korea over recent years has been widely noted as a potential risk to the country’s economy. In particular, the sustained increase in U.S. interest rates have raised the risk of default on household debt. To prevent the spread of household defaults in the economy as a whole, policies for consumer credit recovery should be re-evaluated, and institutional improvements are needed. This study considers the characteristics of delinquent borrowers and draws policy implications from a quantitative analysis of data from a representative consumer credit recovery program. In particular, we assemble a massive but precise micro-data set to identify the major factors that influence the process of consumer credit recovery. From the findings, we derive a set of substantial policy proposals. Our analysis classifies delinquent borrowers into three groups as follows: (i) group A, delinquent borrowers who are eligible for the credit recovery program; (ii) group B, delinquent borrowers who have applied to the program and are paying off their debt; and (iii) group C, delinquent borrowers who have completely paid off their debt and are no longer part of the program. Our results have several policy implications. First, the probability that delinquent borrowers will settle their debt by using the credit recovery program gradually decreases as the delinquency period increases. In addition, the probability of delinquent borrowers settling their debt through the credit recovery program is significantly affected by the amount of their debt, their age, and the period of delinquency. The empirical results also show that delinquent borrowers with smaller bonds, lower ages, and shorter delinquency periods have a higher tendency to join the program, and a greater willingness to recover their creditworthiness. A longer delinquency period and a higher age both reduce the probability of starting the program. Therefore, it is necessary to start the credit recovery program and manage it within the system before the delinquency period grows too long. Second, the probability of completing the program gradually increases as the delinquency period becomes longer. The successful completion of the program is mainly a function of the amount of debt and the debt reduction rate. A smaller bond and a higher debt reduction rate make it easier to repay the debt and complete the program. Notably, we find that borrowers with longer delinquency periods are more likely to pay off their debt completely, and this finding is robust after controlling for the debt reduction rate. This pattern emerges because a longer delinquency period increases the debt reduction rate, and improves the borrower’s ability to repay the debt. Over time, the causes of delinquency (e.g., unemployment and illness) tend to be resolved, and the borrower’s ability to repay increases. Therefore, it is necessary to consider expanding the grace period (i.e., the period in which a borrower does not need to follow the repayment plan), as this allows borrowers more time to recover their ability to repay the debt. Third, there is a time limit to the recovery in a borrower’s ability to repay. Borrowers with longer delinquency periods are more likely to pay off their debt completely, because the causes of delinquency are more likely to be resolved. However, borrowers who are overdue by more than 10 years are less likely to complete the credit recovery program. Currently, the government is promoting a debt relief program for delinquent borrowers whose total debt is less than KRW10 million, and whose delinquency period is longer than 10 years. Our results provide an empirical basis for this policy. In considering the empirical results regarding the relationship between the delinquency period and the probability of completing the program, we suggest that the program’s efficiency can be improved by restricting the number of extensions of the valid period for delinquent debt, restricting the extensions to small amounts of money, and offering such extensions to low-income borrowers only.

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In recent decades, share repurchases have greatly increased (Dittmar and Field, 2015; Floyd, Li, and Skinner, 2015; Sul, Kim, and Jang, 2004). Institutional ownership has also grown during this period, and institutional investors have had an increasingly significant effect on corporate decision making (Gugler, Mueller, and Yurtoglu, 2008; Yun and Kim, 2015). Even so, the existing literature has generally maintained that each institutional investor has unique characteristics. In particular, institutional investment horizons can be a notable dimension of heterogeneity among institutional investors (Bushee, 1998; Gaspar, Massa, and Matos, 2005; Chen, Harford, and Li, 2007; Aghion, Van Reenen, and Zingales, 2013). In this paper, we examine the relationship between institutional investment horizons and share repurchases. We hypothesize that firms with higher short-term institutional ownership engage in more share repurchases than those with lower short-term institutional ownership. Our conjecture is based on two considerations. First, short-term institutional investors are more likely to care more about the capital gains they expect from an increase in a firm’s stock price than they care about the firm’s long-term value. In financial markets with information asymmetry, share repurchases of overvalued firms benefit the shareholders who sell their shares, but such repurchases harm the investors who hold their shares. Accordingly, firms typically repurchase their stocks only when they are undervalued, and then stock repurchases typically stimulate an increase in stock prices (Lucas and McDonald, 1998). Although stock repurchases reduce the information asymmetry between firms and shareholders by providing the market with information on a firm’s intrinsic value, these repurchases may not enhance the firm’s growth or improve its operations. Given that short-term institutional investors may not remain shareholders of the firm for long, those investors are more likely to be concerned with the short-term capital gains that can result from share repurchases. Long-term institutional investors are more concerned with how share repurchases may affect a firm’s long-term value creation. Second, short-term institutional investors often have more information on a firm’s stock prices than long-term institutional investors (Yan and Zhang, 2009). More informed shareholders can make better decisions on a firm’s stock trades, and they can gain more profit from selling their shares. Therefore, more informed shareholders prefer share repurchases that can reap greater capital gains (Brenan and Thakor, 1990). Previous studies (Grinblatt and Titman, 1989; Wermers, 2000; Yan and Zhang, 2009) have indicated that short-term institutional investors are better informed about stock prices, and they tend to realize abnormal profits. Therefore, short-term institutional investors are more likely to prefer stock repurchases. To test our hypothesis, we measure institutional investors’ investment horizons with reference to turnover ratios. Following the literature (Gaspar et al., 2005; Attig, Cleary, El Ghoul, and Guedhami, 2013), we define a turnover ratio as the weighted average of the total portfolio’s churn rates among a firm’s institutional investors. We also use two other proxies for investment horizons, which are measured as the percentages of ownership of a firm held by long- and short-term investors. We define long-term (short-term) investors as those whose turnover ratios are in the bottom (top) tertile. In addition, a firm’s stock repurchases are measured as the amounts paid for stock repurchases, divided by the amounts of total payouts (that is, the sums of cash dividends and stock repurchases). Our final sample represents 3,404 Korean firm-year observations from 2004 to 2017. We find that the investment horizons of institutions are negatively related to share repurchases. In particular, firms that are mainly held by short-term institutional investors tend to make more repurchases. Our findings remain unchanged when we address endogeneity issues subject to measurement error and omitted variable bias. Specifically, our results are robust to using various measures of stock repurchases, and they hold after conducting a propensity score matching procedure and a change regression. Interestingly, we also find that when firms are classified as Chaebol or non-Chaebol firms, the negative association between institutional investment horizons and share repurchases is observed only in the Chaebol firms. Chaebol firms often have fewer financial constraints, due to the presence of internal capital markets. The controlling owners of Chaebol firms also tend to exercise greater control than owners of non-Chaebol firms. These characteristics of Chaebol firms are likely to provide a suitable environment for increased repurchases. Overall, our empirical findings suggest that shorter institutional investment horizons are among the most important factors explaining increased buybacks. Previous studies have analyzed the effects of institutional investors on corporate policies by regarding institutional investors as an homogeneous group. Relatively few researchers have investigated the heterogeneity of institutional investors. This study focuses on examining the differing investment horizons of institutions, and it makes a contribution to the corporate finance literature by examining the determinants of firms’ payout policies. Moreover, we add to the literature on Chaebol firms by showing that firm characteristics appear important for explaining the relationships between institutional investment horizons and stock repurchases.

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The informed investors’ order choice problem has been generally under-discussed, although this problem can exert a pervasive influence on trading and asset prices. In the literature, it has been long assumed that informed investors rely solely on market orders. Theoretical modeling of order choice under conditions of information asymmetry has been widely perceived to be complicated so far. Few empirical studies have been done on this subject, and even fewer have considered non-highfrequency data, primarily because detailed order and transaction data are rarely available. This article builds on the implications of several studies, and this article tests the hypothesis that investors with long-term private information prefer limit orders. When investors have information that is unlikely to spread among other market participants in the near future, the execution risk is low. In that case, the investors would wait discreetly for their limit orders to be executed at hopefully favorable prices and avoid influencing the market price, rather than rushing to take trading opportunities at a premium by placing market orders. As investors have information, the risk of adverse selection problem also remains low. To test this hypothesis, I investigate the trading practices of domestic institutional and individual investors. Compared with individual investors, institutional investors have been widely assumed to be better informed about future stock returns, at least for the intermediate-term of under a year. As institutional investors manage larger funds, they are more likely to spend resources to produce long-lived private information, and are concerned about the possibility of impacting prices. Individual investors are not usually considered to have superior information, but some evidences support their ability to predict future returns. In my simple preliminary analysis, I find that institutional investors are commonly able to predict the future returns for large stocks, and individual investors are often able to predict the future returns for small stocks. To provide empirical evidence regarding the aforementioned hypothesis, I use a unique dataset that includes every order and transaction of equity shares on the Korean Stock Exchange between January of 1999 and August 2009. I find that institutional investors make significantly more limit orders in purchasing (selling) stocks whose ex-post four-week returns are in the highest (lowest) quintile, and that they also return to use more limit orders after prices start to rise (fall) rapidly along with the general increase in market orders. In addition, according to our Fama-MacBeth (1973) cross-sectional regressions similar to those of Kelley and Tetlock (2013), institutional investors’ limit order imbalance positively predicts the following 4- to 12-week returns. In particular, the institutional investors’ return predictability on the biggest 30% stocks in particular is significant, both statistically and economically. These predictions do not reverse until 52 weeks later. These findings are robust when the order imbalances of individual and foreign investors are included as additional explanatory variables. The market order imbalances of institutional investors generally do not predict future returns. Concerning individual investors, no evidence is found that they use more limit orders when purchasing the stocks whose ex-post four-week returns are in the highest quintile. These investors use more limit orders in selling ex-post loser stocks, but the insignificant predictability of their negative limit order imbalances for predict future returns suggests that this increase in limit orders is unrelated to having private information. During the upward (downward) price movements, individual investors only tend to increase their market orders steadily for purchasing (selling) those winner (loser) stocks. Thus, on average, individual investors seem to be no better informed than the market as a whole. However, the limit order imbalances of individual investors strongly predict the 4- to 52-week returns on small stocks, especially when these limit order imbalances are positive. These overall results of individual investors can be compatible if a small number of individual investors do hold superior information on small-cap stocks, whereas it is more difficult for average investors to acquire information on these stocks, due to their deeper information asymmetry. In general, the market order imbalances of individual investors do not predict these stocks’ future returns. In summary, institutional investors prefer limit orders when they trade on the basis of private information on large stocks, and individual investors prefer limit orders when they trade small stocks on the basis of positive private information. Only a small fraction of the institutional investors and a smaller fraction of the individual investors seem to acquire high-quality long-lived information before prices fully converge to the reservation prices. My findings suggest that in some situations, investors can take profits due to having superior information. Such information can remain unrevealed to the public for longer periods than has been previously assumed according to efficient market theory. This article contributes to the discussion of order choice problems under information asymmetry. My findings can also help to reconcile the inconsistencies that domestic institutional and individual investors’ predictions on future returns show mixed results.

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