Since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, corporations have been encouraged to participate in the governmental goal of increasing corporate ownership by the black majority population. One vehicle that has arisen to help facilitate an increase in corporate ownership has been black economic...

Dufour and Engle (J. Finance (2000) 2467) find evidence of an increased presence of informed traders when the NYSE markets are most active. No such evidence, however, can be found by Manganelli (J. Financial Markets (2005) 377) for the infrequently traded stocks. In this paper, we fit a...

We examine whether consumer confidence - as a proxy for individual investor sentiment - affects expected stock returns internationally in 18 industrialized countries. In line with recent evidence for the U.S., we find that sentiment negatively forecasts aggregate stock market returns on average...

If rating agencies add no new information to markets, their actions are not a public policy concern. But as rating changes may be anticipated, testing whether ratings add value is not straightforward. This paper argues that ratings and spreads are both noisy signals of fundamentals and suggest...

This paper analyzes alternative models for emerging sovereign ratings. Although a small number of economic fundamentals explain ratings reasonably well, variations in those economic fundamentals are themselves explained by a small number of world factors. On the other hand, global financial...

We show that the introduction of a new asset affects the prices of previously existing assets in a market. Using data from 254 IPOs in emerging markets, we find that stocks in industries that covary highly with the industry of the IPO experience a larger decline in prices relative to other...

Using count-data techniques, this paper studies the determinants of currency choice in the issuance of foreign-currency-denominated bonds. In particular, we investigate whether bond issuers choose their issuance currency in order to exploit the borrowing-cost savings associated with deviations...

We develop an agent-based financial market model in which agents follow technical and fundamental trading rules to determine their speculative investment positions. A central feature of our model is that we consider direct interactions between speculators due to which they may decide to change...

We develop a simple model of a speculative housing market in which the demand for houses is influenced by expectations about future housing prices. Guided by empirical evidence, agents rely on extrapolative and regressive forecasting rules to form their expectations. The relative importance of...