The authors argue clearly and convincingly in this book that the debt crisis which has plagued the world economy for the past ten years is due to the inherent fragility of financial markets. Governments, financial institutions and borrowers, including developing countries, have simply expected...

Despite a documented decline in the number of dividend payers in the UK it is found that aggregate real dividends paid by industrials actually increased between 1979 and 2000. This was attributed to the firms lost from the sample being generally small distributors of dividends whilst the growth...

The microstructure of stock markets and futures markets has attracted considerable recent attention, but the evidence relating to options markets is sparse, especially for the U.K. This article addresses this void in the literature by presenting evidence on the intraday behavior of bid-ask...

This paper investigates the dividend decisions of firms in the UK reporting losses after sustained periods of profitability. It is found that loss-making firms are more likely to reduce dividends compared to firms that remain profitable, although a loss is far from a guarantee that the dividend...

In 1990, Britain became the first developed country to reorganise its electricity industry to run on competitive lines. The British reforms are widely regarded as the benchmark for other reforms and the model used provides the basis for reforms of electricity and other network industries around...

The UK stockmarket is tested for mean variance efficiency (MVE) in the sense that sectoral stock returns satisfy the restrictions implied by CAPM. There are two main innovations in the paper. One is the use of a model for excess returns in which the conditional covariance matrix of returns...