This paper examines the conditional and unconditional mean returns and variance of returns of daily gold and silver contracts over the 1982-2002 period. Despite the importance of these metals as industrial and investment products, they have received scant attention in recent years. In...

The preholiday behaviour of equity price and return indices on the Irish Stock Exchange do nor display consistent positive pre-holiday returns. This is contrary to the majority of studies on this area, and the result is found across a number of sectoral indices. The analysis also indicates that...

Traditionally, analysts and traders have expected to see a stable, reasonably predictable, relationship between the price (and thus the rate of return) of gold and silver. Both these metals retain important industrial, commercial and investment uses. Recent research has cast some doubt on this...

This paper examines the optimal allocation of assets in well diversified equity based portfolio where the investor is concerned not only with mean and variance but also with the skewness of the returns. Beginning with an analysis of the rationale for concerning with skewness, the paper then...

This paper examines banking and financial sector return co-movements between the three largest Central and Eastern European countries to have recently joined the European Union, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In order to build up an understanding of the soundness and stability of...

We study the evolution of global equity market integration using US dollar denominated iShares. Designed to mimic the movements of MSCI indices, these securities provide an easy pool of international diversification products for the investor. As such they allow us to conduct an analysis of the...

We investigate the information shares of the two main centers of gold trading, over a 25 year period, using non overlapping 4 month windows. We find that neither London nor New York are dominant in terms of price information share, that the dominant market switches from time to time and that...

We examine by means of a survey and subsequent statistical analysis the extent of financial risk tolerance in Irish adults. We administer the (J. Grable & Lytton, 1999) 13 item risk tolerance instrument, and find confirmed a number of stylized facts found elsewhere on age, gender and education...

TWe undertake a first benchmark study of economic literacy in Ireland using a panel of 700+ adults to assess the economic knowledge of respondents. Sources of economic information are analysed and ranked in order of usefulness. Accuracy of response in each section is analysed across each...

We assess whether two classes of bubbles occur in the spot price of gold, rational speculative and periodically bursting bubbles, using gold's' lease rates for the first time in the literature as a measures of its fundamental value. This question is of particular significance as these are the...