There has been a long dispute about the relative importance of country versus industry diversification. We test the hypothesis that institutional ownership affects the relative importance of country and industry effects in explaining stock returns worldwide. We find that industry effects become...

This study is motivated by the China puzzle: the very impressive post-reform growth with relatively low aggregate volatility in the absence of healthy financial institutions by international standards. We argue that political economy constraints on the reform process have made China‟s...

Bank runs and banking crises have become global phenomena occurring repeatedly in both developed and developing countries during the last few decades. Bank runs and banking crises have increased since financial liberalization in the 1980?s and 1990?s (Davis and Karim, 2007). In Indonesia, bank...

This paper investigates the return linkages and volatility transmission between oil and stock markets in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries over the recent period 2005-2010. We employ a recent generalized VAR-GARCH approach which allows for transmissions in return and volatility. In...

In a recent paper, Geanakoplos and Fostel (2008) suggest that financial markets operate under three conditions: the normal economy, when the liquidity wedge is small and leverage is high; the anxious economy, when the liquidity wedge is big, leverage is curtailed and the general public is...

A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is a comprehensive, economy-wide data framework of real accounts, typically representing the economy of a nation but also providing the link between the economy and the rest of the world in terms of trade flows. However, in order to have complete picture of the...

The dating of cyclical phenomena in economies, such as business cycles, is at the core of economic policy research. Moreover, policy decisions which are due to affect interacting economies should take into account the economies' connectedness and synchronicity. The cross-country analysis of...

The standard vector error correction (VEC) model assumes the iid normal distribution of disturbance term in the model. This paper extends this assumption to include GARCH process. We call this model as VEC-GARCH model. However as the number of parameters in a VEC-GARCH model is large, the...

Investigate how retail investors determine their stock trading through experience to achieve the desired portfolio returns. To examine how retail investors coordinate their expected returns and perceived risk. Verify how retail investors’ trade potentials augment transactions on the stock...

This paper evaluates if and how speculation affects the volatility of commodity futures: it distinguishes between short term and long term measures of speculation and investigates if the impact on volatility is different. Speculation is measured by means of four indexes: scalping, Working’s T,...