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...

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...

Policymakers often express concern that herding by financial market participants destabilizes markets and increases the fragility of the financial system. This paper provides an overview of the recent theoretical and empirical research on herd behavior in financial markets. It addresses the...

This paper develops a simple methodology to test for asset integration, and applies it within and between American stock markets. Our technique relies on estimating and comparing expected risk-free rates across assets. Expected risk-free rates are allowed to vary freely over time, constrained...

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 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...

Investors seek to hedge against interest rate risk by taking long or short positions on bonds of different maturities. We study changes in risk taking behavior in a low interest rate environment by estimating a market stochastic discount factor that is non-linear and therefore consistent with...

The estimation of discount factors is a central issue in empirical finance, particularly in the literature on excess volatility. In particular, it is difficult to find empirical discount factors that are volatile enough to account for fluctuations in asset prices. This paper constructs discount...

A structural vector autoregression model is developed to analyze the dynamics of bond spreads among a sample of mature and developing countries during periods of financial stress in the last decade. The model identifies and quantifies the contribution on bond spreads from global market...