Despite the longstanding insider trading debate, there is little empirical research on insider trading laws, especially in a comparative context. The article attempts to fill that gap. I find that countries with more prohibitive insider trading laws have more diffuse equity ownership, more...

Deborah Davis-Friedmann (1991) described the “retirement” pattern of the Chinese elderly in the prereform era as “ceaseless toil”: lacking sufficient means of support, the elderly had to work their entire lives. In this paper we re-cast the metaphor of ceaseless toil in a labor supply...

This paper compares the standard economic and a complementary socio-economic approach to the transition. While the economic approach looks at social problems from the outside and views them as costs of transition, the socio-economic approach looks at these problems from the inside and views them...

This study compares the characteristics and the price behavior of case-by-case privatization initial public offerings, private sector initial public offerings and the mass privatization program in Poland over the first eight years after the reopening of the Warsaw Stock Exchange in April 1991....

The study examines the economic consequences of regulated disclosure in the banking sector, focusing on its impacts on the stability of banking systems. In a cross-country study of banking systems across 49 countries in the 90s, I find that banking crises are less likely in countries with...

While the importance of equity markets as a vehicle for capital formation is well recognized, their role in providing economically valuable governance services, particularly to small and medium enterprises (SME), has not received much attention. The paper examines the role of public policy in...

We study the stock market integration of emerging CEE-3 stock markets (namely, the Czech, Hungarian, and Polish markets) and hypothesize that this process has been gradual over time. As a proxy for integration, co-movements with three stock market indices that represent the developed markets...

We detect and quantify asymmetries in the volatility spillovers of petroleum commodities: crude oil, gasoline, and heating oil. The increase in volatility spillovers after 2001 correlates with the progressive financialization of the commodities. Further, increasing spillovers from volatility...

This paper studies the dynamics of volatility transmission between Central European (CE) currencies and the EUR/USD foreign exchange using model-free estimates of daily exchange rate volatility based on intraday data. We formulate a flexible yet parsimonious parametric model in which the daily...