The efficient market hypothesis states that the market incorporates all available information to provide an accurate valuation of the asset at any given time. However, most models for forecasting the return or volatility of assets completely disregard the arrival of asset specific news (i.e.,...

The first public share issue in the PRC took place in 1994. By the early 21st century, in the space of less than two decades, the Chinese stock market has become the largest one in Asia, with the exception of Japan. Along with this rapid enlargement of the market, the Chinese stock trading...

The roots of the 2008 financial crisis are often traced back to the collapse of the housing bubble. The factors that precipitated the crisis, and propagated its effects on firms and consumers to produce an economic contraction, are still the subject of ongoing debate among academics, policy...

This dissertation addresses issues concerning liquidity and its volatility. It consists of two essays. The first essay, "Liquidity, Macro Factors and the U.S. Equity Flows to Emerging Markets", examines the role of liquidity on equity flows from the U.S. to fifteen emerging markets around the...

This paper examines pricing in the market for depositary receipts, securities designed to track the performance of a stock index that trade like shares of stock. Arbitrage costs are low because these assets have low fundamental risk, low transactions costs, and high dividend yields. We find that...

The most important factor that affects the decision making process in finance is the risk which is usually measured by variance (total risk) or systematic risk (beta). Since investors' sentiment (whether she is an optimist or pessimist) plays a very important role in the choice of beta measure,...

This thesis addresses asset pricing in Chinese A-share stock markets using a dataset consisting of all shares listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from January 1997 to December 2007. The empirical work is carried out based on two theoretical foundations: the efficient market...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to perform a comparative study of prediction performances of an artificial neutral network (ANN) model against a linear prediction model like a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) with regards to forecasting corporate credit ratings from financial...

Taiwan had approximately 3,000 buildings damaged by floods with an economic loss of NT$12.8 billion annually, a figure 4.5 times more than economic losses due to fire damages. Many insurers become extremely cautious when underwriting their flood policies for people living in areas that are...