Israel’s compliance with International Organization of Securities Commissions’ objectives and Principles of Securities Regulation has been assessed. The regulatory regime is well developed and in most respects is comparable with that of major jurisdictions. For the most part, it is...

This paper surveys the foreign exchange markets, money and secondary government security markets, and stock exchanges in 107 smaller economy countries. The underdevelopment of these markets impedes risk transfer, monetary policy, corporate financing, and the capacity to absorb capital inflows....

This paper reviews the experiences of a few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that have succeeded in attracting fairly large amounts of foreign investment. The review indicates that sustained efforts to promote political and macroeconomic stability and implement essential structural reforms have...

This technical note focuses on fixed income markets for Thailand. The note recommends that Thailand should begin an orderly transition from merit-based regulation of corporate issuers and institutional investors to a disclosure-based regulatory system that opens the debt market to a larger and...

Japan's most powerful known earthquake struck at 2:46p.m. on Friday, March 11, 2011. We study the unusual trading behaviors of individual and foreign investors in Japan during the aftermath of this natural disaster. Individual investors typically show contrarian trading patterns, so the sharp...

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of six corporate governance mechanisms (institutional investors, foreign investors, major investors, debt ratio, board size and board composition) on the quality of corporate risk disclosure. The study uses a sample of listed firms in the...

This study investigates the impact of foreign investors on the informational efficiency of stock prices in local markets. Using a large sample of Japanese firms over the period 1976 to 2008, we find that prices deviate less from a random walk for stocks with a large change in foreign ownership....