The need to develop securities market has, following the recent international financial crises, increasingly attracted the attention of national and international policy makers. Never before have developed and developing countries shared such a strong interest in ensuring the stable growth of...

This paper, which is motivated by the literature on international asset pricing and recent work on exchange rate determination, investigates dynamic relationshiops between major currency and equity markets. Using a multivariate GARCH framework, we examine conditional cross- autocorrelations...

We study the behavior of real exchange rates in a two­country dynamic equilibrium model. In this model, consumers can only consume domestic goods but can invest costlessly in capital stocks of both countries. Nevertheless, transporting goods between the two countries is costly and, hence, the...

Static time series models usually assume stationarity, normality, and independence for the increments of financial rates of return. This paper investigates the empirical characteristics of financial rates of return from Latin American stock and currency markets and documents that their empirical...

Prices of currency options commonly differ from the Black-Scholes formula along two dimensions: implied volatilities vary by strike price (volatility smiles) and maturity (implied volatility of at­the­money options increases, on average, with maturity). We account for both using Gram­Charlier...

This paper investigates the performance of international affine term structure models (ATSMs) that are driven by a mutual set of global state variables. We discuss which mixture of Gaussian and square root processes is best suited for modelling international bond markets. We derive necessary...

We document a surprising pattern in market prices of S&P 500 index options. When implied volatilities are graphed against a standard measure of moneyness, the implied volatility smirk does not flatten out as maturity increases up to the observable horizon of two years. This behavior contrasts...

EU accession requires, inter alia, free movements of capital. If a massive capital outflow occurs, the central banks from the accession or acceding countries may carry two types of intervention: on money market, and introducing restrictions on capital account. The paper explains when is...

We investigate Swedish firms’ use of financial hedges to reduce their foreign exchange exposure for 1997–2001. The study uses survey data, which enables us to differentiate between hedging aimed at translation exposure and transaction exposure, respectively. The survey responses show that...

For the first time, non-parametric statistical tests, originally developed by Sherry (1992) to test the efficiency of information processing in nervous systems, are used to ascertain if the Asian FX rates followed random walks. The stationarity and serial independence of the price changes are...