Libya is still in the early stages of its financial liberalisation and reform following eleven years of political chaos and nearly three decades of central planning control. However, it is advancing as a result of the removal of UN and US sanctions during the last few years, and there are signs...

We generate an original dataset on bribe payments at two competing ports in Southern Africa that allows us to take an unusually close look at the relationship between bureaucratic organization, bribe-setting behavior and the costs corruption imposes on users of public services. We find that the...

The stock market capitalization (SMC) of a country, defined as the aggregated market value equity of companies in the respective equity market, is commonly used to measure the widening and deepening of stock market activity. SMC also influences economic growth predictions and public consensus...

Researchers have developed investigations into both initial and seasoned equity offering (SEO) by obtaining data from developed markets (e.g. Denis, 1994; Kothari and Warner, 1997; Corwin, 2003; Eckbo et al., 2006), while the literature in emerging markets is relatively neglected. This thesis provides an...

This paper provides an alternative real options framework to assess how firms' strategic interaction under imperfect competition a?ects the industrial dynamics of investment, concentration, and expected returns. When firms have similar production technologies, the cross sectional variation in...

In spite of early skepticism on the merits of floating exchange rate regimes in emerging markets, 8 of the 25 largest countries in this group have now had a floating exchange rate regime for more than a decade. Using parsimonious VAR specifications covering the period of floating exchange rates,...

This paper reviews and categorises the literature on micro-systemic risks and on optimal policies designed to mitigate these risks. Micro-systemic risks are risks to the financial system that occur when the interaction of a bank with other banks or with financial markets, can propagate an...

While herding has long been suspected to play a role in financial market booms and busts, theoretical analyses have struggled to identify conclusive causes for the effect. Recent theoretical work shows that informational herding is possible in a market with efficient asset prices if information...

This study examines the use of principal component techniques in analysing term structures of interest rates. It employs original methods of estimating B-Spline models with endogenous knot positions and applies the method of Dierckx (1981) to generate new data sets for the study. The variability...

The aim of this thesis is the development of a political economy of large accounting and auditing firms. The importance of this lies in the rapid growth of these firms and the lack of appropriate theories. Economists have applied the theory of the firm to accounting and have approached auditing...