This paper applies the “market microstructure” literature to the specific features of government securities markets and draws implications for the strategy to develop government securities markets. It argues for an active role of the authorities in fostering the development of efficient...

Prices in futures markets and option markets reflect expectations about future price movements in spot markets, but these prices can also be influenced by risk premia. Futures and forward prices are sometimes interpreted as market expectations for future spot prices, and option prices are used...

This note examines the impact of measurable and unmeasurable (not correlated with observed aggregates) information on secondary market LDC loan prices. The Institutional Investor country risk ratings are used to construct a proxy for the non-quantifiable information that moves debt market...

We study a model where investment decisions are based on investors’ information about the unknown and endogenous return of the investment. The information of investors consists of endogenously determined messages sold by financial analysts who have access to both public and private information...

The paper examines the behavior of stock returns in the Egyptian stock exchange, the efficiency of the market in pricing securities, and the relationship between returns and conditional volatility. GARCH(p,q)-M models estimated for the four best known daily indices indicate significant...

The study presents an analysis of the information content of IMF’s Data Quality Assessment Framework (DQAF) indicators. There are significant differences in the quantity of information between DQAF dimensions and sub-dimensions. The most informative DQAF dimension is accessibility, followed by...

We analyze holdings of public bonds by over 20,000 banks in 191 countries, and the role of these bonds in 20 sovereign defaults over 1998-2012. Banks hold many public bonds (on average 9% of their assets), particularly in less financially-developed countries. During sovereign defaults, banks...

The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) which comes to life on November 1, 2007, represents a major step toward the creation of a single, more competitive, cross-border securities market in Europe. Together with other components of the European Commission''s Financial Services...

This paper introduces a new dataset on the composition of the investor base for government securities in the G20 advanced economies and the euro area. During the last decades, investors from abroad have increased their presence in government bond markets. The financial crisis broke this trend....