Over the period 2002 to 2003,Switzerland and the European Union (EU) were engaged in negotiations regarding banking secrecy. The EU's stated goal was for Switzerland to abolish banking secrecy. Switzerland refused and offered to impose a withholding tax on interest income instead. The two...

In this paper we analyse recovery rates on defaulted bonds using the Standard and Poor’s/PMD database for the years 1981-1999. Due to the specific nature of the data (observations lie within 0 and 1), we must rely on nonstandard econometric techniques. The recovery rate density is estimated...

We investigate the influence of various fundamental variables on a cross-section of credit default swap transaction data. Credit default swap rates can be seen as a superior proxy to credit risk than bond spreads are. Because we have transaction prices rather than quotes, we have thus...

Morck, Yeung and Yu (MYY, 2000) show that R2 and other measures of stock market synchronicity are higher in countries with less developed financial systems and poorer corporate governance. MYY and Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel and Xu (2001) also find a secular decline in R2 in the United States over...

To obtain the maximum benefits from diversification, financial theory suggests that investors should invest internationally because of the larger potential for risk reduction stemming from the lower correlation exisiting between assets of different countries. The question that we raise in this...

This paper addresses whether country allocation provides benefits over industry allocation in a sample of European country and industry indexes. Strategy performance is compared using a mean-variance spanning test. We find that, for investors with low risk aversion, industry allocation is as...

We use constrained cross-section regressions to disentangle the effects of various factors on international real estate security returns. Besides a common factor, pure country, property type, size, and value/growth factors are considered. The value/growth measure that is used in this paper...

This paper reassesses, at the light of economic and financial theory, the well-documented recent evolution of the euro area public debt and equity markets. Doing so leads to associating the EMU and the single market with the changes in fundamentals and financial integration with convergence in...

This paper investigates the relative performance of local and foreign financial analysts on Latin American emerging markets. There is strong evidence that foreign financial analysts outperform local analysts on these markets. Foreign analysts produce more timely and more accurate forecasts. A...

This paper offers a systematized and updated view of competition between exchanges. It is divided in two parts: In the first part, we describe the recent reforms in stock exchanges and the main forces driving the development of competition. The second part surveys research done on stock exchanges.