It is believed that financial markets are integrated and sensitive to news – including political conflicts in some regions of the world. Furthermore, financial markets seem to react differently to information flows from one region to another. The purpose of this research is to discern the...

Forecasts of crude oil prices' volatility are important inputs to many decision making processes in application areas such as macroeconomic policy making, risk management, options pricing, and portfolio management. Despite the fact that a large number of forecasting models have been designed to...

The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the statistical distributions of returns on 32 UK sector indices as well as the FTSE-All and the FTSE-100 indices. These data are modelled for several holding periods, ranging from one day to one quarter, using symmetric stable Paretian...

This paper provides evidence of a negative association between macroeconomic uncertainty and the cross sectional dispersion of investment rate for a panel of Japanese manufacturing firms. We show that an increase in uncertainty leads to the narrowing of the cross section dispersion of investment...

Since the 1980s, important and progressive reforms have profoundly reshaped the structure of the Chinese banking system. Many empirical studies suggest that financial reform promoted bank competition in most mature and emerging economies. However, some earlier studies that adopted conventional...