The objective of this paper is to review the transmission mechanisms uniting equity market development and economic growth in developing countries. We find that the theoretical impact of equity markets is ambiguous. At the domestic level, the allocation function of equity markets appears...

An important puzzle in international finance is the failure of the forward exchange rate to be a rational forecast of the future spot rate. It has often been suggested that this puzzle may be resolved by using better statistical procedures that correct for both non-stationarity and nonnormality...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate vulnerability to financial contagion in a set of expanding emerging markets of the Middle East and North Africa, during seven episodes of international financial crisis. Using Fry amp; Baur (2005) fixed-effect panel approach, we significantly reject...

The objective of this paper is to situate the MENA area within the emerging markets universe. We first discuss the various components of market emergence and generate four bootstrapped indexes reflecting market size, market activity, market pricing and transparency. We then draw inter-regional...

The minimum spanning tree (a concept from Physics) is used to study the process of market integration for a large group of national stock market indices. We show how the asset tree evolves over time and describe the dynamics of its normalized length, mean occupation layer, and single- and...

We examine the issue of possible portfolio diversification benefits into seven Middle-Eastern and North African (MENA) stock markets. We construct international portfolios in dollars and local currencies. We compute the ex-ante weights by plugging five optimization models and two risk measures...

Based on weekly data of the Dow Jones Country Titans, the CBT-municipal bond, spot and futures prices of commodities for the period 1992-2005, we analyze the implications for portfolio management of accounting for conditional heteroskedasticity and structural breaks in long-term volatility. In...

This paper analyzes the existence of flights from stocks to bonds and vice versa. We propose a definition and a test for flight-to-quality, flight-from-quality and cross-asset contagion and examine their characteristics and effects for the financial system. The empirical analysis for eight...

The objective of this paper is to study capital market integration in smaller European countries and its implications for an international portfolio investment allocation. A time-varying analysis based on Barari (2004) suggests that the markets have recently started moving towards international...