Despite on-going improvements in traffic law enforcement practices and technology, unlicensed driving remains a serious road safety problem in Australia. Among a range of concerns, there is growing evidence linking unlicensed driving with a cluster of other high-risk factors, including drink...

International financial integration allows countries to become net creditors or net debtors with respect to the rest of the world. In this paper, we show that a small set of fundamentals-shifts in relative output levels, the stock of public debt and demographic factors-can do much to explain the...

In a sample of 60 developing countries, we find evidence of a strong-almost one-to-one-relationship between capital inflows and domestic investment. However, this relationship has evolved over time. While growing financial integration with the rest of the world has increased access to foreign...

The current economic policy discussion on financial integration in the European Union concentrates on cross-border mergers. We study the impact of cross-border lending in a theoretical model where banks acquire either hard or soft information on borrowing firms and predict that the closer firms...

To testify RIP, this study scrutinizes the mean-reversion behavior of bilateral real interest differentials (RIDs) in eight East Asian economies. We incorporate the ASEAN-5, South Korea and China (mainland) with the US and Japan taken as base countries. Four sub-samples within 1976-2004 are...

This paper demonstrates that, after integration, equity portfolios of countries that joined the European Monetary Union have converged at faster rate than those of NON EMU countries. This outcome canbe interpreted as a combination of the convergence of inflation rates and the convergence of...

The shift of perspective from a national basis to a Euro area basis, inevitably induced by EMU, has led member countries to a parallel shift from equity home bias to equity Euro bias. We interpret this evidence by means of a standard mean-variance portfolio selection model modified in order to...

During the recent turmoil in world financial market and its cascading disruptive effects, the role of financial integration assumes importance. A common outshoot of such financial crises generated locally or regionally is that they spread faster to other connected markets and economies to the...

This paper measures financial integration among selected European Union equity markets over the period July 1990 to June 2006 using daily data. Eleven markets (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom) are included in the...

Due to growing skepticism over the globalisation process across countries, economists in the emerging market economies (EMEs) are anxious to know how the integration of financial markets was associated with the recent global crisis and whether there could be some key lessons for the broader...