We examine the issue of possible portfolio diversification benefits into seven Middle-Eastern and North African (MENA) stock markets. We construct international portfolios in dollars and local currencies. We compute the ex-ante weights by plugging five optimization models and two risk measures...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate vulnerability to financial contagion in a set of expanding emerging markets of the Middle East and North Africa, during seven episodes of international financial crisis. Using Fry & Baur (2005) fixed-effect panel approach, we significantly reject the...

The objective of this paper is to review the transmission mechanisms uniting equity market development and economic growth in developing countries. We find that the theoretical impact of equity markets is ambiguous. At the domestic level, the allocation function of equity markets appears...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the MENA’s potential for portfolio diversification benefits by examining long run equity linkages with daily data over the 1998-2004 periods. Our analysis is based on several co-integration analyses and an extension of Akdogan measures of financial...