Two years after the Polish "Big Bang," privatization In Eastern Europe, the cornerstone of transition, has been progressing at a slow pace which frustrates many reformers in these countries. Notwithstanding the considerable growth of private firms from new entry, the relative number of...

This paper examines the impact of multinational trade accords on the degree of stock market linkage using NAFTA as a case study. Besides liberalizing trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico, NAFTA has also sought to strengthen linkage among stock markets of these countries. If successful, this...

Since February 2001, the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission allowed domestic trade in foreign-currency denominated shares (B-shares) whose trade was originally restricted to foreign investors. We investigate possible effects of lifting the ownership restriction on the B-share discounts and...

Inflationäre Überraschungen und reale Wirtschaftsaktivität in Westdeutschland: Einige Tests auf der Grundlage von Erwartungen "effizienter Märkte" Diese Untersuchung behandelt die empirische Gültigkeit der Hypothese einer um Erwartungen bereinigten Angebotsfunktion (Expectations-Adjusted...

This paper investigates the hypotheses that the recently established Mexican stock index futures market effectively serves the price discovery function, and that the introduction of futures trading has provoked volatility in the underlying spot market. We test both hypotheses simultaneously with...

Despite its intuitive appeal, empirical evidence on the consumption-based CAPM remains unclear at best. Model restrictions are often rejected, parameters are estimated imprecisely, and inferences can be highly sensitive to model specifications and choice of instruments. This paper tests the fit...

We examine how firm characteristics, particularly the degree of firm complexity and the firm's need for specialty knowledge, affect the relationship between corporate governance and the risk of bankruptcy. We find that having larger boards reduces the risk of bankruptcy only for complex firms....

Resource mobilization under the Islamic profit-loss-sharing (PLS) principle has recently been a central theme for extensive discussion in academic and policy circles alike. Although the PLS scheme is widely practiced in many contemporary Muslim countries that are striving to Islamize their...

We test the implications of overconfidence behavior using U.S. intraday trading data. We propose several testable hypotheses for return autocorrelations, trading volume, return volatility, and for the causal interrelations between volume and volatility. As predicted by overconfidence behavior,...