The country risk literature argues that country risk ratings have a direct impact on the cost of borrowings as they reflect the probability of debt default by a country. An improvement in country risk ratings, or country creditworthiness, will lower a country's cost of borrowing and debt...

There exist several important benchmark indexes in environmental finance, some computed by well-known financial index providers such as the Dow Jones group and others by independent agencies specializing in environmentally and socially responsible investing in finance. The construction of these...

Since the 1970s, electronics and associated electrical equipment (henceforth “electronics”) has been one of the most dominant industries in the developed countries, with its geographical centre firmly rooted in the USA. The overall presence of electronics patents in the USA is considerable,...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of the Chinese B share market reform on the conditional correlation and information transmission between A and B Shares issued in the Shanghai and Shenzen stock exchanges. Daily returns for the Shanghai A share index (SHA), Shanghai B share...

Following the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 events, the risks associated with engaging in international dealings have increased substantially, and become more difficult to analyse and predict for decision makers in the economic, financial and political sectors. The importance of country...

Flows of international capital to developing countries have fluctuated substantially over the last three decades. Empirical evidence concerning the main causes of international capital flows is, in general, mixed. There is strong support for the ‘push’ view that external factors have been...

During the last two decades, there has been a growing fascination with the livelihood of islands with small populations and territories which overwhelmingly rely on tourism as a source of exports. The small island tourism economies (SITEs) analyzed in this paper were colonised, and had depended...

It is well known in the literature that obtaining the parameter estimates for the Smooth Transition Autoregressive-Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (STAR-GARCH) can be problematic due to computational difficulties. Conventional optimization algorithms do not seem to...

Since the introduction of the Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ARCH) model of Engle [R. Engle, Autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity with estimates of the variance of United Kingdom inflation, Econometrica 50 (1982) 987–1007], the literature of modelling the conditional...

Although the impact of structural breaks on testing for unit root has been studied extensively for univariate time-series, such impact on panel data unit root tests is still relatively unknown. A major issue is the choice of model in accommodating different types of break prior to testing for...