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...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare the weak-form efficiency of a set of 24 African continent-wide stock price indices and those of eight individual African national stock price indices. Design/methodology/approach – Variance-ratio tests based on ranks and...

Previous research provides unequivocal evidence that women-owned businesses start with both lower levels of overall capitalization and lower ratios of debt finance. Structural dissimilarities between male-owned and female-owned businesses explain most, but by no means all, of these contrasting...

Central bank independence is widely thought be a sine qua non of a credible commitment to price stability. The surprise decision by the UK government to grant operational independence to the Bank of England in 1997 affords us a natural experiment with which to gauge the impact on the yield curve...

We document and account for two facts regarding the relation between international interest rates and total factor productivity (TFP) in a sample of developing countries. First, there is a negative correlation between both variables at quarterly frequency. Second, the share of agricultural labor...