This paper analyses the development of the banking sector in twelve transition countries. Foreign banks have become major players in the financial system of these countries. Still, foreign bank presence and financial development in general vary considerably between these economies. Distance from...

This paper presents a scoring model that predicts the risk of drop-out for borrowers at a microfinance lender in Bolivia. Drop-out risk was greater for women, manufacturers, newer borrowers, and those with more arrears. Out-of-sample tests suggest that scoring may help microfinance lenders to...

Attempts to gauge the depth of outreach of microfinance organizations usually start--and often end--with the measurement of loan size. But just what is loan size? Loan size has at least seven aspects, each of which matters not only for depth of outreach but also for profitability. The aspects...

We discuss the use of order book as a source of information and show step by step the procedure of its reconstruction for the case of Istanbul Stock Exchange. We then propose many new variables derived from the order book potentially prolific for future research. We also put forward an original...

Two 'event' scales for financial markets, called 'scale of market shocks' (SMS), are introduced, which measure the importance of the market movements. These indices are based on the price volatility and are computed by integrating mapped asset volatilities over time horizons that range from 1...

The financial rates of return from Latin American stock and currency markets are found to be non-normal, non-stationary, non-ergodic and long-term dependent, i.e., they have long memory. The degree of long- term dependence is measured by monofractal (global) Hurst exponents from wavelet...

This paper gives an overview of some issues related to market aluation, focusing on the developments on the New York equity markets. The 42.4 p.c. fall in the S&P 500 price index between 24 March 2000 - when it reached its all-time high - and 31 December 2002 is situated in a very long term...

The distributional form of financial asset returns has important implications for the theoretical and empirical analyses in economics and finance. It is now a well-established fact that financial return distributions are empirically nonstationary, both in the weak and the strong sense. One first...

This paper examines the impact of the Internet on financial markets