In this paper, we relate security returns in the thirty securities in the Dow Jones index to regime shifts in the market portfolio (S&P500) volatility. We model market volatility as a multiple-state Markov switching process of order one and estimate non-diversifiable security risk (beta) in the...

This paper considers the role of language in labour earnings in South Africa over the period 1996 to 1998. Our pooled cross-section comprises of over 180,000 working age adults, and the analysis considers the decision to participate in the labour force, employment prospects and labour earnings....

This paper estimates return to schooling for african and coloured women in South Africa. It compares parametric and semiparametric estimates of the sample selection model for the case of return to schooling. The parametric estimator is the one proposed by Heckman (1979) and the semiparametric...

If country and currency risk premiums are positively correlated, a negative international liquidity shock harms twice the economy, thereby substantially increasing interest rates. This harmful positive correlation between country and currency risk premiums observed in some countries is called...

We propose a semi-parametric approach to investigate whether co-dependence across markets increase in periods of extreme returns. Given that returns on one market fall in the extreme tail of their own distribution, we compute the conditional probability that returns on another market will also...

This paper introduces a nonparametric estimator for tail dependence in the constant conditional correlation GARCH framework, in contrast to existing estimators that impose the iid assumption. So long as stationarity is satisfied, the difference between the distribution of the tail dependence...

: This paper tests the random walk hypothesis for the stock markets of the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, Hong Kong and Australia using unit root tests and spectral analysis. The results based upon the augmented Dicky Fuller (1979) and Phillips-Perron (1988) tests and spectral analysis find that...

In this paper we study the question of debt sustainability from a risk management perspective. The debt accumulation equation for any country involves variables that are stochastic and closely intertwined. When these aspects are taken into consideration the notion of debt sustainability is...

We show that very little is needed to create liquidity under-supply in equilibrium: only the presence of credit constraints on demand. We show that the under-supply is a non-monotone function of the demand distortion that causes it, a result that may have interesting implications for emerging...

This paper presents both the time-series and cross-country evidence on the growth of global equity markets and attempts to shed some light on the sources of equity market growth. Using data on 33 countries, I find that development of financial intermediaries and openness to trade are positively...