We investigate agency variation in credit quality assessment (Standard and Poor's vs. Moody's vs. Fitch) employing sovereign ratings data for 129 countries, spanning the period 1990 to 2006. While we find that the credit rating agencies often disagree about credit quality, it is usually confined...

This study investigates the aggregate stock market impact of local currency and foreign currency sovereign rating changes. Consistent with evidence pertaining to company credit rating changes, we report that only rating downgrades have a wealth impact on market returns. Decreases in local...

Several studies advocating safety first as a major concern to investors propose downside beta risk as an alternative to the traditional systematic risk- beta. Downside measures are concerned with a subset of the data and therefore the results in the studies that consider the downside beta only...

Following Brounen and Eichholtz (2002) this paper adds to the international literature investigating the underpricing of REIT initial public offerings (IPOs), with a study into Australian property trusts. This study finds that initial day returns can in part be explained by forecast profit...

This study employs the rolling bicorrelation statistic to measure the degree of stock price deviations from a random walk for the stock markets of 50 countries over the period 1995-2005. We find that stock markets in economies with low per capita GDP in general experience more persistent price...

This study investigates the applicability of the CAPM in explaining the cross section of stock return on the Karachi Stock Exchange for the period September 1992 to April 2006. Unlike earlier studies on emerging markets this study is carried out with a broader scope. Firstly, the tests are...

In the multiscaling approach a time series is decomposed into different time horizons referred to as timescales. In this paper we investigate the risk-return relationship in a downside framework using timescales. Two measures of downside risk; downside beta and downside co-skewness are...

Givoly (1985) provides formal evidence on the relation between the past history of earnings and their own forecast. Our study uses a new methodology, modified Granger causality tests, to further analyze the information flows between earnings and forecasts. Our application of this widely...

We investigate the impact of scheduled government announcements relating to six different macroeconomic variables on the risk and return of three major US financial markets. Our results suggest that these markets do not respond in any meaningful way, to the act of releasing information by the...

Using a matched sample design where companies are matched by size and industry from Australian, Canadian and US capital markets, we investigate whether capital market integration varies across industries. The tests are conducted in the Capital Asset Pricing Model and multi-factor pricing...