The purpose of this article is to assess how the changing operations of international banks in emerging countries in the last decades have altered the risks they face as well as their mitigation techniques. The recent expansion of the international banking business through the setup of branches...

In view of this changing landscape, we look at the three major drivers of growth in consumer finance: auto finance, housing finance and consumer durable finance. We discuss the trends in each of these areas as well as the shortcomings which are slowing down growth. We present some of the...

The paper assesses the usefulness of selective hedging strategies when combined with forecast techniques in the live hog contract. The use of routine futures and options hedging is not attractive relative to a cash-only strategy. However, forecasting and hedging can contribute to price risk...

Foreign exchange rates can be subject to considerable daily fluctuations (up to 5 percent within one day). This can, in certain cases, cause serious losses on open overnight positions. Given a maximum tolerable loss for a company, limits have to be set on open overnight positions in foreign...

This paper examines the forecasting performance of GARCH’s models used with agricultural commodities data. We compare different possible sources of forecasting improvement, using various statistical distributions and models. We have chosen to confine our analysis on four indices which are the...

Many interest rates are as volatile as exchange rates and thus represent an equally important source of risk for corporations. While this is true not only for financial institutions, but for other corporations as well, little is known about the interest rate exposure of nonfinancial firms....

It has been viewed as an unsolved puzzle that only for a small number of firms a significant impact of foreign exchange rate risk on firm value could be detected empirically. This paper investigates whether the results of previous studies can be explained by the fact that only the linear...

This paper presents international evidence on the use of financial derivatives for a sample of 7,292 non-financial firms from 48 countries including the United States. Across all countries, 59.8% of the firms use derivatives in general, while 43.6% use currency derivatives, 32.5% interest rate...

Firm value is influenced in many direct and indirect ways by financial risks, which consist of unexpected changes of foreign exchange rates, interest rates and commodity prices. The fact that a significant number of corporations are committing resources to risk management activi-ties is,...

Hedge funds are said to be rewarding investments because they have favourable risk-return characteristics on a standalone basis, and because they offer valuable diversification with respect to traditional stock and bond markets. On the other hand, hedge fund returns have a number of...