Using US bank holding company data for the period 2001 to 2007, this paper examines the relationship between banks' retained interests in securitisations and insolvency risk. We find that the provision of credit enhancements and guarantees significantly increases bank insolvency risk, albeit...

Using a signal extraction framework and looking at OECD countries over a 30 year period this paper attempts to identify a number of variables significant in predicting near-crises as a pre-cursor to full-fledged crises. These include growth in pension assets as an indicator for the development...

The mean variance efficiency (MVE) of a portfolio of international bonds and equities is tested using a CAPM model of excess returns. The conditional variances and covariances of the portfolio returns are allowed to time-vary according to shocks in up to three global macro-economic variables...

In this paper we compare a variety of technical trading rules in the context of investing in the S&P500 index. These rules are increasingly popular both among retail investors and CTAs and similar investment funds. We find that a range of fairly simple rules, including the popular 200-day moving...

We test the robustness of the APT to two alternative estimation procedures: the Fama and MacBeth (1973) two-step methodology; and the one-step procedure due to Burmeister and McElroy (1988). We find that the APT is indeed sensitive to the chosen estimator and assumptions about the factor...

The extent of non-trading is shown to be much greater in the UK than in the more heavily researched US equity markets. Over the period 1975 to 1995 we find that almost 44% of all stocks in our sample failed to trade on the last day of a given month, a figure which is significantly higher than...