We use partisan and opportunistic political business cycle (“PBC”) considerations to develop and test a framework for explaining election-period changes in credit spreads for developing country sovereign bonds. Pre-election bond spread trends are significantly linked both to the partisan...

Using a sample of 2,827 firms from 21 countries we examine whether insider trading laws achieve the primary objective for which they are introduced – protecting uninformed investors from private information-based trading. We find that when control is concentrated in the hands of a large...

We use partisan and opportunistic political business cycle (“PBC”) considerations to develop a framework for explaining election-period decisions by credit rating agencies (“agencies”) publishing developing country sovereign risk-ratings (“ratings”). We test six hypotheses derived...

Despite the longstanding insider trading debate, there is little empirical research on insider trading laws, especially in a comparative context. The article attempts to fill that gap. I find that countries with more prohibitive insider trading laws have more diffuse equity ownership, more...

This paper analyses the interest rate pass-through for five economies of the Caucasus – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Employing an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) specification to monthly data, we find that the interest rate pass-through is systematically...

The study examines the economic consequences of regulated disclosure in the banking sector, focusing on its impacts on the stability of banking systems. In a cross-country study of banking systems across 49 countries in the 90s, I find that banking crises are less likely in countries with...

We analyze the dynamics of price jumps and the impact of the European debt crisis using the high-frequency data reported by selected stock exchanges on the European continent during the period January 2008 to June 2012. We employ two methods to identify price jumps: Method 1 minimizes the...

The three countries took different stances in regards to economic policy; the Czech Republic pursued a shock therapy regime which aimed to stabilise the economy, Hungary’s policy was more relaxed whilst Poland had an aggressive reform programme. Regarding monetary policy the Czech Republic...

We analyze the behavior and performance of multiple price jump indicators across markets and over time. By using high-frequency stock market data we identify clusters of price jump indicators that share similar properties in terms of their performance in that they minimize Type I and Type II...

We detect and quantify asymmetries in the volatility spillovers of petroleum commodities: crude oil, gasoline, and heating oil. The increase in volatility spillovers after 2001 correlates with the progressive financialization of the commodities. Further, increasing spillovers from volatility...