This article aims to assess barriers to service provision in the banking and telecom sectors of four Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, and the impact of these barriers on firm performance. Our methodology involves the computation of aggregate and modal trade restrictiveness indices...

This paper investigates the effects of the long-run relationship between stock cash index and futures index on the hedging effectiveness of six stock futures markets. Effectiveness of five different hedging ratios depending on different estimation procedures is investigated. The unhedged, the...

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to undertake an examination of the impacts of socio-demographic and economic variables on the probability of purchasing financial products. There is relatively little empirical research that has been taken to understand how the underlying economy...

This article examines how microstructure effects, evident in high frequency data, influence bid–ask spreads and volatility in transaction price series. It uses the event of European Monetary Union (EMU), and the upheaval that this entailed, as an opportunity to empirically investigate these...

This paper analyses a security market with transaction costs and a sequential trading structure. Transaction costs may prevent many traders from revealing their private information if they trade in a sequential fashion. Due to the information aggregation failure, hidden information gets...

The role that international trade plays in measuring sustainable development has come under recent scrutiny. We examine international resource flows using an input–output framework that is akin to ‘ecological balance of payments’ analysis. This framework allows us to use to calculate the...

This paper investigates the evidence for convergence in per capita incomes across 115 economies during the period 1950–1998 and examines the impact that international trade had on this process. Drawing on trade-conditioning within a distribution dynamics framework, that explicitly models...

Unrealistic optimism is all around us, and it is a well-documented psychological phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to take a critical approach of the main research done in the area and to analyze the important impact that it has in many economic and managerial contexts. We also analyze...

How should we think of the role of regions in relation to the global economy? Theory has surprising gaps when it comes to building a unified vision of these two scales of development. Two contributions to such a vision are proposed in this article. First, the relationship between geographic...

In this paper, we show that ownership structures vary considerably across the largest European economies, and that ownership has a significant impact on firm performance. We demonstrate that ownership structures in Europe are not necessarily consistent with value maximisation principles....