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...

This paper tests for the martingale (or random walk) hypothesis in the stock prices of a group of Asian countries. The selected countries represent well-developed markets (Hong Kong and Japan) as well as emerging markets (Korea, Taiwan and Thailand). This paper adopts a new joint variance ratio...

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...

We study how heterogeneous beliefs affect returns and examine whether heterogeneous beliefs are a priced factor in traditional asset pricing models. To accomplish this task, we suggest new empirical measures based on the disagreement among analysts about expected (short-term and long-term)...

Most investors purchase securities knowing they will resell those securities in the future. Uncertainty about the preferences of future trading counter-parties causes randomness in future resale prices that we call liquidity risk. It is natural to suppose that investors are asymmetrically...

``Limits of Arbitrage" theories require that the marginal investor in a particular asset market be a specialized arbitrageur. Then the constraints faced by this arbitrageur (i.e. capital constraints) feed through into asset prices. We examine the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market in this...

This paper examines the long-run dynamics and the cyclical structure of the US stock market using fractional integration techniques. We implement a version of the tests of Robinson (1994a), which enables one to consider unit (or fractional) roots both at the zero (long-run) and at the cyclical...

Promising emerging equity markets often witness investment herds and frenzies, accompanied by an abundance of media coverage. Complementarity in information acquisition can explain these anomalies. Because information has a high fixed cost of production, its equilibrium price is low when...

In recent times, economists concur that economy's response to monetary policy is somewhat weaker then they were in the past. However, the cause of such change remains an open issue. One plausible reason for this change could be attributed to the financial reform processes that have brought...

A government policy regarding the reduction of state shares in state-owned enterprises (SOE) triggered a crash in the Chinese stock market. The sus- tained depression even after policy adjustments constitutes a puzzle— the so called “state-share paradox.”The empirical evidence shows...