Precious metals (gold, silver, and platinum) have become an important part of investment portfolios for individuals as well as for institutions. A key question is whether investors should actively trade these metals to time the market or whether they should take a buy-and-hold strategy. This...

The aim of this paper is to examine the positive and negative impacts of stock exchange mergers on the informational efficiency of the markets. We consider a range of factors in relation to the stock exchange merger, that can potentially affects market efficiency, after a merger. These factors...

This study examines return predictability of major foreign exchange rates by testing for martingale difference hypothesis (MDH) using daily and weekly nominal exchange rates from 1975 to 2009. We use three alternative tests for the MDH, which include the wild bootstrap automatic variance ratio...

A Monte Carlo experiment is conducted to compare power properties of alternative tests for the martingale difference hypothesis. Overall, we find that the wild bootstrap automatic variance ratio test shows the highest power against linear dependence; while the generalized spectral test performs...

This study examines return predictability of major foreign exchange rates by testing for martingale difference hypothesis (MDH) using daily and weekly nominal exchange rates from 1975 to 2009. We use alternative MDH tests for linear and nonlinear dependence, which include wild bootstrap...

Financial market participants and policy-makers can benefit from a better understanding of how shocks can affect volatility over time. This study assesses the impact of structural changes and outliers on volatility persistence of three crude oil markets - Brent, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and...

We determine the events that cause large shocks in volatility of the DJIA index over the period 1928-2010, using intervention analysis and conditional heteroscedasticity model. We use a moving subsample window to take into account the periods with high or low volatility, allowing thus to...

We examine whether global or local events are important drivers in causing major shifts and excessive volatility in Islamic indexes than in conventional indexes. We apply an iterative cumulative sum of squares (ICSS) algorithm to identify structural breaks in the volatility of several major Dow...

Financial market participants and policy-makers can benefit from a better understanding of how shocks can affect volatility over time. This study assesses the impact of structural changes and outliers on volatility persistence of three crude oil markets – Brent, West Texas Intermediate (WTI)...