Non-equity financial markets used to be ‘hidden’ in Europe, in the sense that relative to their size, they traditionally received less attention from ordinary investors and the media than equity markets. This phenomenon was accentuated by the fact that the Financial Services Action Plan was...

After the adoption of the EU pension funds directive, the regulatory framework for asset management in the EU is complete. The single licence and home country control will now be applicable across the board for the different lines of asset management business. However, considering that asset...

Despite a documented decline in the number of dividend payers in the UK it is found that aggregate real dividends paid by industrials actually increased between 1979 and 2000. This was attributed to the firms lost from the sample being generally small distributors of dividends whilst the growth...

The microstructure of stock markets and futures markets has attracted considerable recent attention, but the evidence relating to options markets is sparse, especially for the U.K. This article addresses this void in the literature by presenting evidence on the intraday behavior of bid-ask...

Purpose: A growing strand of literature has focused on the returns performance of zero dividend stocks. This paper seeks to provide new evidence on the link between dividend payment and returns history and firms’ subsequent stock market performance.Design/methodology/approach: Prior research...

This paper examines the lead/lag relationships between the FTSE100 stock market index and its related futures and options contracts, and also the interrelation between the derivatives markets. Both the index futures and index options contracts are found to lead the cash index as predicted....

This paper investigates the dividend decisions of firms in the UK reporting losses after sustained periods of profitability. It is found that loss-making firms are more likely to reduce dividends compared to firms that remain profitable, although a loss is far from a guarantee that the dividend...

This article analyses the economics of financing banking supervision and attempts to respond to two questions: What are the most common financing practices? Can the differences in current financing practices be explained by country specific factors? We perform an empirical analysis that...