Does Market Organization Speed Up Market Stabilization? First Lessons From the Budapest and Warsaw Stock Exchanges

This paper investigates whether different systems of financial market organization influence the way in which newly created stock markets become more (weak-form) efficient. The author conducts a detailed comparative analysis of stocks listed on the Budapest and Warsaw Stock Exchanges, 1991-98, and demonstrates that an auction market (with call trading) becomes efficient more quickly than a dealer market (with continuous trading). As an econometric tool for comparative analysis, she uses a Test for Evolving Efficiency which is a GARCH-M model with time-varying constraints.