Financial globalization was off to a rocky start in emerging economies hit by Sudden Stops in the 1990s. The surge in foreign reserves since then is viewed as a New Merchantilism in which reserves are a war-chest for defense against Sudden Stops. We conduct a quantitative assessment of this...

This paper uses firm-level data from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys to study the process of convergence of transition countries with developed market economies. The study focuses on competition and market structure, finance and the structure of lending to firms, and...

We consider the effect of asymmetric information on the price formation process in a quote-driven market where one market maker receives a private signal on the security fundamental.A model is presented where market makers repeatedly compete in prices: at each stage a bid-ask auction occurs and...

This paper focuses on the impact of financial market infrastructures (FMIs) and of their regulation on the post-crisis transformation of securities and derivatives markets. It examines, in particular, the role that trading and post-trading FMIs, and their new regulatory regime, are playing in...

Die Vorstellung selbst-stabilisierender, zum Gleichgewicht tendierender Finanzmärkte, lange Zeit als Selbstverständlichkeit angesehen, ist durch die aktuelle Banken- und Kreditkrise in Frage gestellt. Trotz ausgefeilten Risikomanagements der Banken und einer an Basel II orientierten Aufsicht...

We show that U.S. stock and Treasury futures prices respond sharply to recurring stale information releases. In particular, we identify a unique macroeconomic series--the U.S. Leading Economic Index^® (LEI)--which is released monthly and constructed as a summary statistic of previously released...

We document considerable return comovement associated with accruals after controlling for other common factors. An accrual-based factor-mimicking portfolio has a Sharpe ratio of 0.16, higher than that of the market factor or the SMB and HML factors of Fama and French. According to rational...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of IFRS adoption on MENA's emerging stock markets and to shed some light on the macro-economic determinants which have had an important influence on stock market development. The empirical study is conducted using a balanced panel data from...

The globalisation of capital markets has encouraged moves toward regional harmonization and integration. This report examines and compares the level of development of capital markets in the South Asian region, assesses the prospects for greater harmonization and integration, and proposes a set...