Although there is a lack of consensus regarding derivatives and the development of sharia-compliant funds to mimic hedge funds in order to tap the global surplus liquidity especially the Gulf petrodollar, sharia scholars are generally agreeable that hedging is permissible and necessary as a risk...

Discovery for Eastern European enterprises based on their cross-listing on Western European exchanges. Despite the fact that the crosslisting behavior of companies has been analyzed very actively since the mid-70s, many competing hypotheses exist, and the debate is far from reaching an end....

This paper develops a series of stock market representativeness indices as a new method for analysing stock market development, and applies this method to data on stock markets and economies of thirty-one European countries, as well as Japan and the USA. The main conclusion is that stock markets...

We analyze foreigners' and domestic institutional investors' positions in U.S. equities. Controlling for many factors, we uncover a common preference for large firms and firms that are diversified internationally. The domestic preference for internationally diversified firms implies that...

We examine the effect of securities laws on stock market development in 49 countries. We find almost no evidence that public enforcement benefits stock markets, and strong evidence that laws facilitating private enforcement through disclosure and liability rules benefit stock markets

This introductory note summarizes and draws together the work reported in eight research papers written by staff economists of the Board's Division of International Finance as part of a project on global financial integration. The eight papers are also International Discussion Finance Discussion...

In 2003 China posted its highest economic growth rate in seven years, a robust 9.1 percent. Today the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) dwarfs by more than eight fold its level of 1978, the year China began taking its first tentative steps away from a centrally-planned communist economy...

Capital markets perform two distinct functions: provision of capital and facilitation of good governance through information production and monitoring. I argue that the governance function has more impact on the efficiency with which resources are utilized within the firm. Based on industry...

In this paper we propose a new method to compute the cost of capital in domestic and in international settings. Our formulas show the effect of information costs on the cost of capital and give the conditions under which the domestic and the international approach yield the same results in the...

This paper uses a triple difference approach to assess whether the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act predicts long-term changes in cross-listing premia of affected foreign firms. I measure cross-listing premia as the difference between the Tobin's q of a cross-listed company and a...