This paper investigates whether different systems of financial market organization influence the way in which newly created stock markets become more (weak-form) efficient. The author conducts a detailed comparative analysis of stocks listed on the Budapest and Warsaw Stock Exchanges, 1991-98,...

The creation of Europe’s ‘new’ stock markets represents a major experiment in market design with important implications for the ability to support innovative, fast-growing companies. We evaluate the success of these markets based on a large number of measures of firm performance and...

Based on a two-country, two-period general equilibrium model of the spot and futures markets for crude oil, we show that there is no theoretical support for the common view that oil futures prices are good predictors of the spot price in the mean-squared error sense; yet under certain conditions...

In the finance literature, cross-sectional dependence in extreme returns of risky assets is often modelled implicitly assuming an asymptotically dependent structure. If the true dependence structure is asymptotically independent then existing finance models will lead to over-estimation of the...

This paper introduces a model, based on the Kalman filter framework, which allows for time varying parameters, latent factors, and a general GARCH structure for the residuals. With this extension of the Bekaert and Harvey (1997) model it is possible to test if an emerging stock market becomes...

We investigate how the relative contribution of external factors to stock price movements varies with the degree of financial development. We find that financial development makes stock markets more susceptible to external influences (both financial and macroeconomic). Interestingly, this effect...

This is a preliminary draft of an Invited Symposium paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society to be held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and 'standard' economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can...

In the first half of the twentieth century, the UK capital markets were marked by an absence of investor protection; by the end of the century, there was more extensive protection there than virtually anywhere else in the world. The UK therefore provides an exceptional laboratory for evaluating...

Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...