This is the first paper to examine the microstructure of the Irish Stock Market empirically and is motivated by the adoption, on June 7th of Xetra the modern pan European auction trading system. Prior to this the exchange utilized an antiquated floor based system. This change was an important...

Prior research suggests an inverse relationship between geographic distance and financial market linkages. In this paper, we examine whether and how cultural distance between countries mitigates this finding. We find that country-pairs exhibit higher linkages if they have smaller cultural...

<heading format="display" id="h1" implicit="yes" level="1">Abstract</heading> As part of a broader financial development reform agenda, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries have successfully expanded and revitalised their stock markets over the last decade. Whereas previous contributions have investigated efficiency, international integration and...

An important puzzle in international finance is the failure of the forward exchange rate to be a rational forecast of the future spot rate. We document that even after accounting for nonstationarity, nonnormality, and heteroskedasticity using parametric and nonparametric tests on data for over a...

This paper analyzes the existence of flights from stocks to bonds and vice versa. We propose a definition and a test for flight-to-quality, flight-from-quality and cross-asset contagion and examine their characteristics and effects for the financial system. The empirical analysis for eight...

This paper models the monthly price volatilities of four precious metals (gold, silver, platinum and palladium prices) and investigates the macroeconomic determinants (business cycle, monetary environment and financial market sentiment) of these volatilities. Gold volatility is shown to be...

The minimum spanning tree concept from physics is used to study the process of market integration for a large group of national stock market indices. We show how the tree grows over time and describe the dynamics of its various characteristics. Over the period studied, 1997-2006, the tree shows...

The mixture of distributions hypothesis (MDH) suggests that trading volume of shares provides information to share prices and returns. This study examines this, for the first time, in the context of the Irish stock exchange. The evidence is mixed, and only weakly in favour of the MDH. Volume...

This paper investigates the relationship between seven mood-proxy variables and a global equity dataset using a variety of group tests. The mood-proxy variables are constructed from weather data (precipitation, temperature, wind, geomagnetic storms) and biorhythm data (seasonal affective...