We document, for a new data set, the existence of daily seasonality. The data set consists of the trades in four equities and two bonds on the Dublin stock exchange for the mid nineteenth century.

Substantial evidence exists to indicate that a negative Monday, or in some case Tuesday, mean return is achieved by stock market indices. In contrast to these and to previous Irish studies, this paper finds that there is no negative Monday or Tuesday return, there being a persistent and positive...

We examine the effect of the appointment of directors on the share price of FTSE companies. We find that the share price reaction to the appointment of directors suggests that gender is not an issue in the appointment of nonexecutive directors, but it does have an effect on the market reaction...

Given the dominant role the U.S. economy plays in global trade, we explore how U.S. macroeconomic surprises affect stock markets in ten major developed economies as well as in China and India. We do not find strong enough evidence to conclude that U.S. macro shocks materially and consistently...

Forward exchange rate unbiasedness hypothesis (FRUH) has been a widely researched subject for decades. Recently, the sample populations of these studies have expanded to include developing country currencies. The majority of these findings have been that forward rate biasedness is more...

The Friday the 13th anomaly of Kolb and Rodriguez (1987) is revisited in an international context. Drawing on the philosophy of science approach of Lakatos (1978), the paper argues the importance of “anomalies” and the need for triangulation. Using the FTSE world indices over 1988–2000 for...

The concept of a minimum spanning tree is used to study the process of market integration for a large group of national stock market indices. We show how the asset tree evolves over time and describe the dynamics of its normalized length, mean occupation layer, and single- and multiple-step...

This paper presents an empirical examination of firm characteristic determinants of the capital structure of a sample of 299 Irish small and medium sized firms (SMEs). Hypotheses formulated from pecking order and agency theories incorporating a financial growth life cycle approach are tested on...

The key contribution of this paper is an empirical examination of the financial growth life cycle model by combining a number of statistical tests. This approach is significantly different to that traditionally adopted in empirical investigations of SME financing, which is to examine the...