The research field related to finance has made great progress in recent years due to the development of information processing technology and the availability of large-scale data. This special issue is a collection of 16 articles on empirical finance and one book review. The content is six...

This paper uses the CCF approach to analyze and determine whether there is a causal relationship between the world energy price index and China’s international competitiveness. The data on the volatility of energy prices can provide information in addition to that available in the price data...

This paper empirically analyzes the relationship among the prices of Taiwanese stocks, Japanese stocks, and crude oil from January 1980 to July 2008. It provides some interesting results: (1) crude oil prices made an impact on Japanese stock prices, while the latter exerted a strong influence on...

This paper empirically analyzes the size of the underground economy in Japan. The results show that (i) the size of the underground GDP peaked in the early 1990s but has been declining since; (ii) the underground economy reached its peak in around 1992, approximating 25% of nominal GDP; and (iii)...

This paper used Monte Carlo simulations to analyze the small sample properties of cross-sectionally augmented panel unit root test (CIPS test). We considered situations involving two types of time-series heteroskedasticity (unconditional and ARCH) in the unobserved common factor and...

This paper investigates the sustainability of trade balances in the Sub-Saharan African regions, using both the panel unit root (IPS) test proposed by Im et al. (2003) and the cross-sectionally augmented version of the IPS (CIPS test) suggested by Pesaran (2007), where the former test is based...

This article empirically analyzes the role of finance in economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of what is termed herein “financial permeation”. By estimating panel data on 37 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa between 2004 and 2010, we examine whether financial permeation...

There is no denying the role of empirical research in finance and the remarkable progress of empirical techniques in this research field. This Special Issue focuses on the broad topic of "Empirical Finance" and includes novel empirical research associated with financial data. One example...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is regarded as the science and technology for producing an intelligent machine, particularly, an intelligent computer program. Machine learning is an approach to realizing AI comprising a collection of statistical algorithms, of which deep learning is one such...