The link between informed trading and the bid-ask spread has been the focus of abundant literature and some authors feared that a large amount of informed trading might lead to shutdown of markets. We explore this issue using data from the Czech Republic. Our estimates confirm that the share of...

The study of transparency is increasingly a more topical, broadly relevant, but also more under-researched enterprise. The Asian financial crisis has highlighted not only the welfare consequences of financial sector transparency, sparking a series of yet unresolved debates, but has also linked...

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 examines the mutually reinforcing interactions between exchange rate dynamics and technical trading strategies. I first show that technical trading systems have been quite profitable during the floating rate period. This profitability stems from the successful exploitation of...

We investigate the effect of financial liberalization on the probability of a banking crises in economies with poor transparency We construct a model with imperfect information where banks cannot distinguish between aggregate shocks on the one hand, and government’s policy and firms’...

FX pricing processes are nonstationary and their frequency characteristics are time-dependent. Most do not conform to geometric Brownian motion, since they exhibit a scaling law with a Hurst exponent between zero and 0.5 and fractal dimensions between 1.5 and 2. This paper uses wavelet...

Static time series models usually assume stationarity, normality, and independence for the increments of financial rates of return. This paper investigates the empirical characteristics of financial rates of return from Latin American stock and currency markets and documents that their empirical...

This paper graphically demonstrates the significant impact of the observed financial market persistence, i.e., long term memory or dependence, on European option valuation. Many empirical researchers have observed non-Fickian degrees of persistence or long memory in the financial markets...

We investigate the effects of market fragmentation and information flows in the case of stocks cross-listed on markets in Central Europe and London. First, we test for co-movement, interaction and error correction behavior between the local and London markets. Our results suggest that strong...

This paper studies the international portfolio flows of US investors to examine the information structure of international equity markets. We use an empirical model of portfolio flows with both public and private information to extract measures of trades due to private information. We find that...