The risk-capital positions of Japanese banks have been under tension throughout the 1990s. However, existing theory on the determinants of bank risk-taking still remains limited and the evidence is conflicting. Most studies concentrate on US and European banks, while empirical evidence has...

The Japanese banking industry, including the cooperative sector has been restructured following the crisis of the 1990s. Here we examine the relationship between size and scale economies of cooperative banks in Japan (namely Shinkin and credit cooperatives). We use the translog cost-function...

The skewness in physical distributions of equity index returns and the implied volatility skew in the risk-neutral measure are subjects of extensive academic research. Much attention is now being focused on models that are able to capture time-varying conditional skewness and kurtosis. For this...

This paper investigates the role of credit and liquidity factors in explaining corporate CDS price changes during normal and crisis periods. We find that liquidity risk is more important than credit risk regardless of market conditions. Moreover, in the period prior to the recent ‘Great...

Using a rich dataset of high frequency historical information we study the determinants of European sovereign bond returns over calm and crisis periods. We find that the importance of the equity risk factor varies greatly over time and crucially depends on country risk. In low risk countries,...

The trustees of funded defined benefit pension schemes must make two vital and inter-related decisions - setting the asset allocation and the contribution rate. While these decisions are usually taken separately, it is argued that they are intimately related and should be taken jointly. The...

This study considers the stock performance of America’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens following the annual survey by Business Ethics. We examine both possible short-term announcement effects around the time of the survey’s publication, and whether longer-term returns are higher for firms that...

We study the short-run and long-run performance of Chinese privatization initial public offerings (PIPOs), using data for 340 and 409 new issues on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges respectively, from 1 January 1996 through 31 December 1997. The average market-adjusted initial return is...

We study the short-run performance of the Chinese privatization initial public offerings (PIPOs), using data of 668 new issues on the both Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 1 January 1996 through 31 December 2000. We find that the average market-adjusted initial returns on the 1st, 5th,...

This article studies the link between the predictability of futures returns and the business cycle. Modelling the relationship between the variation through time in expected futures returns and economic activity should give us some insight as to whether the predictable movements in futures...