This paper identifies such fundamental characteristics as the lack of ergodicity, stationarity, and independence, and it identifies the degree of initial persistence of the Chinese stock markets when they were more regulated. The index series are from the Shanghai (SHI) stock market and Shenzhen...

The distributional form of financial asset returns has important implications for the theoretical and empirical analyses in economics and finance. It is now a well-established fact that financial return distributions are empirically nonstationary, both in the weak and the strong sense. One first...

The Value-at-Risk (VAR) measure is based on only the second moment of a rates of return distribution. It is an insufficient risk performance measure, since it ignores both the higher moments of the pricing distributions, like skewness and kurtosis, and all the fractional moments resulting from...

In the context of futures markets, we study whether brokers allocate more favorable trades to their own accounts, and less favorable trades to their customers. We find that, within a thirty minute trading bracket, brokers on average buy at a lower price and sell at a higher price for their own...

We address the issue of whether financial structure influences economic growth. Three competing views of financial structure exist in the literature: the bank-based, the market-based and the financial services view. Recent empirical studies examine their relevance by utilizing panel and...

We investigate the effect of financial liberalization on the probability of a banking crises in economies with poor transparency We construct a model with imperfect information where banks cannot distinguish between aggregate shocks on the one hand, and government’s policy and firms’...

The study of transparency is increasingly a more topical, broadly relevant, but also more under-researched enterprise. The Asian financial crisis has highlighted not only the welfare consequences of financial sector transparency, sparking a series of yet unresolved debates, but has also linked...

As a reaction to the general suspicion that margin loans had been a key element of the stock market boom and crash of the late 1920s, the Federal Reserve Bank was empowered to regulate margin lending with the Securities and Exchange Act. The efficacy of the Federal Reserve's margin policy has...

Previous research has documented that the introduction of options seems to affect the volatility, liquidity, price and other characteristics of the underlying stock. Existing research, however, has not adequately accounted for the fact that option listing is endogenous, a result of decisions...

This paper examines the performances of Asian asset management companies (AMCs). The analysis reveals that AMCs vary in their design and performance. Asset management companies can trigger moral hazard- inspired bank lending. Empirical examination of the Thai experience reveals that the moral...