This paper investigates the possibility that futures markets attract noise traders who engage in positive feedback trading, an especially destabilizing form of noise trading. The hypothesis is tested using data from four major national index futures markets. The empirical evidence is consistent...

Apart from the obvious reasons for raising capital, a firm can hedge its interest rate exposure by issuing debt, the value of which moves in an opposite direction from the value of its assets as interest rate varies. We examine whether firms in the UK market make full use of debt issuances for...

We estimate and test different continuous-time short-rate models for the UK. The preferred model encompasses both the “level effect” of Chan, Karolyi, Longstaff and Sanders (1992a) and the conditional heteroskedasticity effect of GARCH type models. Our findings suggest that including a GARCH...

The paper investigates how firms operating in capital market-oriented economies (the U.K. and the U.S.) and bank-oriented economies (France, Germany, and Japan) determine their capital structure. Using panel data and a two-step system-GMM procedure, the paper finds that the leverage ratio is...