Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of ownership structure and dividend payouts over firm’s profitability, valuation and idiosyncratic risk. The authors further investigate if corporate performance is sector dependent. Design/methodology/approach: The study employs signaling and bankruptcy theories to evaluate the influence of ownership structure and dividend payout over a firm’s corporate performance. The authors use a panel regression approach to measure the performance of family owned firms against that of widely held firms. Findings: The study confines to firms operating out of emerging markets. The results show that family owned firms are dominant with concentrated ownership. The management pays lower dividend leading to lower valuation and higher idiosyncratic risk. The study further illustrates that family ownership concentration and family control both influence firm performance and level of risk. The findings indicate that information asymmetry and under diversification lead to increased idiosyncratic risk, resulting in the erosion of firm’s value. Results also confirm that firms paying regular dividends are less risky and, hence, command a valuation premium. Originality/value: The evidence supports the proposition that information asymmetry plays a significant role in explaining dividend payouts pattern and related impacts on corporate performance. The originality of the paper lies in factoring idiosyncratic risk while explaining profitability and related valuation among emerging market firms.

This article presents an overview of literature on behavioural and experimental asset pricing theory. We systematically review the evolution and current development of behavioural asset pricing models as an alternate approach to asset pricing in financial economics literature. A review and synthesis of research carried out in behavioural finance spreading across theoretical, empirical and experimental approaches are presented to understand the behavioural dimension of pricing of financial assets. From theoretical perspective, behavioural asset pricing models try to adopt additional behavioural variables into asset pricing process. In terms of empirical investigation perspective, it is documented that econometric and computational advancement takes its biggest place ever in financial literature when compared with the other field. Our review underlines the fact that the direction of advancing a methodology is changing from financial literature to economics due to the fact that there is huge account of raw data available to analyze. Future research direction should be judging the empirical power of the asset pricing models and their role in practice for incorporating a new dimension to the model. The distinctiveness of the study is that this is the first attempt to review literature written on behavioural asset pricing models in the form of structural empirical review. In doing so, the historical perspective of the concept and the place it will take in future are clarified and the way further researches will be conducted are explored. JEL: E03, G02, G12

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to survey retail investors to study the determinants of their investment behaviour and show that individual heterogeneity and financial factors such as gender, age, educational status, income, and investment levels determine their trading behaviour across three domains; however, features such as marital status and occupation do not play any significant role in shaping their trading behaviour.Design/methodology/approach: Structured surveys are conducted on retail and small investors using the brokerage services of a firm. Data collected from primary methods are used for statistical analysis in ANOVA and multiple regression frameworks.Findings: The authors also report that retail investors’ self-perceived confidence as a function of both expected and unexpected changes in the market and personal factors largely determines trading behaviour of retail investors and that self-perceived confidence level and self-reported portfolio size are positively associated implying that (over-)confident retail investors tend to believe that their investment skills being superior are bound to perform better and thus they typically hold larger than average investment portfolios.Practical implications: These findings are significant because research on cross-sectional variance of individual investment behaviour explains how investor heterogeneity plays a critical role in investment and asset allocation decisions. Investors, researchers, and practitioners would use the results for financial decision making specifically related to personal finance, behavioural portfolio management, and investment advisory.Originality/value: This paper is an empirical approach to explore the retail investor behaviour using psychometric approach with respect to self-perceived confidence and other perceived measures of investor behaviour. The authors contribute to the emerging set of literature on investor behaviour and behavioural finance.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the direction of causality between foreign institutional investment (FII) trading volume and stock market returns in the Indian context. There is evidence of uni‐directional causalities from stock returns to FII flows across various sample periods. The paper attempts to establish whether net FII trading volume causes variations in stock market returns or vice versa.Design/methodology/approach: Using daily data on three different measures of FII trading volume as proxy for FII trading behaviour and S&P CNX Nifty returns, Granger‐causality approach is applied to investigate the bi‐directional causality between net FII trades and returns.Findings: Bi‐directional causality between net FII investment and Indian stock market return is observed. In general, the FIIs seem to be chasing the Indian stock market returns. It is found that FII trading behaviour resulting in heavy trading volumes may cause variations in stock market returns only in the very short‐term, but afterwards, it is the stock market returns which cause changes in FII trading behaviour.Research limitations/implications: Since foreign equity investors monitor the movement of stock prices, and furthermore, the role of FIIs' exerting impact on Indian stock markets tends to be growing, the authorities will have to develop an environment where FIIs would maintain their positions with confidence, thereby making the markets, as well as investments, more stable. This research considered only stock market returns to test its relationship with three measures of FII trading volume; more macroeconomic as well as microeconomic variables may further be considered for the purpose.Originality/value: The paper contributes some empirical evidence using three different measures of FII trading volume as proxy of FII trading behaviour, and its bi‐directional relationship with Indian stock market returns.