This paper examines the time varying nature of European government bond market integration by employing multivariate GARCH models. We state that unlike other bond markets, in euro markets the default(credit) risk factor and other macroeconomic and fiscal indicators are not able to explain the...

Following the launch of the Euro in 1999, integration among Euro area financial markets increased considerably. As a result, portfolio home bias declined across the European financial markets. However, greater market integration has generated a new bias: portfolio Euro bias, a situation where...

Usually, a monetary union is not considered feasible between countries if the correlations of shocks are positive but weak. This may not be so if the country with the larger output gap converges to full-employment equilibrium faster than the country with the smaller gap. We argue that common...

Responses of inflation and non-oil output growth from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to monetary policy shocks from the United States (US) were estimated to determine whether there is evidence to support the US Dollar as the anchor for the proposed unified currency. A structural...

Output gap is generally used in assessing both the inflationary pressures and the cyclical position of a nation’s economy. However, this variable is not observable and must be estimated. In this paper, we accomplish two tasks. First, we estimate the output gap for the United Arab Emirates...

The main concern of this report is to model the daily and weekly forecasting of the currency in circulation (CIC) for the State of Qatar. The time series of daily observations of the CIC is expected to display marked seasonal and cyclical patterns daily, weekly or even monthly basis. We have...

In this paper, we make two contributions to the literature. First, we construct a new measurement to capture income smoothing effectively. Second, we present new empirical evidence on the linkages between international asset trading and income smoothing. We use factor income inflows instead of...

This study investigates the return spillovers and volatility spillovers from developed markets (e.g., Europe, Japan and the US) into the financial markets of selected emerging countries in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Based on constant and trend spillover models, we...

The economic integration among Euro members has important consequences for the factors driving asset pricing and asset trading within the financial markets. In particular, since the start of the Euro, cross-country equity index correlations in the region have showed upward trends and domestic...

We examine the spillover effects of local and global shocks on Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-wide sector equity returns. We find the GCC-wide sector returns have asynchronous responses to global and regional shocks. Although the effects of these shocks differ in magnitude across individual...