Recent developments in financial economics have included many explorations into market microstructure, that is, the internal functioning of markets and the ways in which they provide liquidity to traders. An important contribution of this literature is that prices can deviate from their...

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...

This paper explores whether changes in the age distribution have significant effects on financial markets that are rational and forward-looking. It presents an overlapping generations model in which agents make a portfolio decision over stocks and bonds when saving for retirement- Using the...

Using a new daily index of social unrest, we provide systematic evidence on the negative impact of social unrest on stock market performance. An average social unrest episode in an typical country causes a 1.4 percentage point drop in cumulative abnormal returns over a two-week event window....

This paper interprets contagion effects as an increase in the volatility of aggregate shocks impinging on the domestic economy. The implications of this approach are analyzed in a model with two types of credit market imperfections: domestic banks borrow at a premium on world capital markets,...

Statistical measures of the volatility of exchange rates, interest rates, and stock prices are estimated for a number of countries. Periods of high volatility are identified and compared with periods of financial difficulty. The results indicate that GARCH models of volatility could be...

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...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the issue of how best to identify speculative asset bubbles (in real-time) remains in flux. This owes to the difficulty of disentangling irrational investor exuberance from the rational response to lower risk based on price behavior alone. In...

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...