(2) Although institutional investors also trade lottery-like stocks, their order ratio is lower, and their trading reduces the excess return comovement of lottery-like stocks. (3) When overall market behavior leans toward speculation (e.g., in a bullish market or during the Chinese New Year period), individual investors exhibit a high demand for lottery-like stocks, which strengthens the excess return comovement of these stocks. (4) Individual investors’ trading of lottery-like stocks and the return comovement of these stocks increase during months when financial statements are released. Adopting the sample of publicly traded firms identified as distressed and audited by the Big 4 audit firms in Taiwan during the 2006-2015 period, the second paper is written by Shiue, Yeh, and Chen examines the relationship between auditors’ signing networks in CPA firms and improved/impaired auditor independence, which is measured by auditors’ propensity to issue going-concern audit opinions. The empirical results indicate that auditors’ degree centrality, proxied by the number of co-signed auditors in the CPA firms, is one of the key determinants of auditors issuing going-concern opinions. When other networks measures, e.g., betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality, are used, the aforementioned finding is only partially supported. Hsiou-Wei Lin David Ming-Huang Chiang San-Lin Chung
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