This study contrasts the effectiveness of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) against more recent augmented variants including size and book-to-market factors (Fama and French, 1993), liquidity (Liu, 2006) as well as both size and liquidity factors of Martinez et al (2005) in explaining...

Investors diversify their portfolios to boost returns and manage risk. However, the benefits of diversifying across geographic regions are reduced if markets are highly correlated. This paper examines trends over the past two decades and finds, as expected from global market integration, that...

The authors build on research into the African equity universe to recommend a more appropriate index for investment. Three different methodologies were investigated, namely capitalization, equal, and fundamental weighting of index constituents. The authors conclude that diversification is not...

Bitcoin has been reported by empirical studies as mostly isolated or uncorrelated with conventional financial assets, thereby expounding its safe haven potentials in both normal and crisis periods. However, instead of the assumptions, the COVID-19 outbreak presents a maiden real global market...

The bear markets associated with the ongoing COVID-19 crisis present a test case to examine the traditionally expounded safe haven capabilities of gold and other precious metals, as well as the growing claims that bitcoin is the new “virtual gold” of our time. New evidence from our paper...

This paper draws on the results of World Bank Enterprise surveys to investigate the relation between financials constraints and innovation performance for a sample of firms in 9 African nations: Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, the Central African Republic, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania, Ghana and the...

In this paper, we investigate the day of the week and the month of the year effects in African stock markets, both in the Gregorian and the Hijri calendars. Specifically, we investigate Monday effect, Friday effect, January effect and Ramadan effect, from January 2009 to December 2019, using OLS...

This study estimates liquidity premiums using the recently developed Liu (2006) measure within a multifactor capital asset pricing model (CAPM) including size premiums and a time varying parameter model for the West African emerging market of Nigeria. The evidence suggests that liquidity factors...

An attempt was made in this paper to ascertain whether firm size plays a significant role in the performance of equity portfolios in Frontier African markets as observed elsewhere and whether the relationship can be adequately explained by the capital assets pricing model and the efficient...

The investment choices of large asset owners such as pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and endowments, are, to a large extent ‘guided’ and pre-determined by the systematic use of old- fashioned indices or benchmarks designed by a small set of Anglo- American ‘index providers’ –...