Traditionally, analysts and traders have expected to see a stable, reasonably predictable, relationship between the price (and thus the rate of return) of gold and silver. Both these metals retain important industrial, commercial and investment uses. Recent research has cast some doubt on this...

This paper examines the optimal allocation of assets in well diversified equity based portfolio where the investor is concerned not only with mean and variance but also with the skewness of the returns. Beginning with an analysis of the rationale for concerning with skewness, the paper then...

This paper re-examines the results of Ciner (2001), who claims that the historically stable relationship between gold and silver has broken down in the 1990's. We show, using a longer run of data, for both cash and futures, that this finding may be unwarranted. In particular we use a recursive...

This short note examines common failures of individual equity investors via the metaphor of the 7 deadly sins of Christian theology. The note appeared in 7 parts in the Sunday Independent, the largest selling newspaper in Ireland, in the April-May 2006 period

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...

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...

Existing studies of household stock trading using administrative data offer conflicting results: discount brokerage accounts exhibit excessive trading, while retirement accounts show inactivity. This paper uses population-wide data from PSID and SCF to examine the overall extent of household...

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...