This paper dissects with great acuteness, the issues of convergence in financial performance dynamics in the African continent through the lenses of stock market capitalization, value traded, turnover and number of listed companies. The empirical evidence is premised on 11 homogenous panels...

Purpose - Natural disasters may inflict significant damage upon international financial markets. The purpose of this study is to investigate if any contagion effect occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis. Design/methodology/approach...

Financial integration among economies has the benefit of improving allocation efficiency and diversifying risk. However the recent global financial crisis, considered as the worst since the Great Depression has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its...

The recent waves of political crises in Africa and the Middle East have inspired the debate over how political instability could pose a risk of financial contagion to emerging countries. With retrospect to the Kenyan political crisis, our findings suggest stock markets in Lebanon, Mauritius were...

This paper studies how the presence of sponsor and external management affect leverage and debt maturity decisions in three major Asian-Pacific REIT markets: Australia, Japan and Singapore. Our empirical results indicate that sponsored REITs opt for higher levels of leverage and loans with...

The growth effects of international financial liberalization and integration are investigated using the methodology and data developed by Rajan and Zingales (1998). The main result is that industries highly dependent on external financing do not experience higher growth in value added in...

There is a huge literature on the effects of uncertainty on trade levels. One very strong result of that literature is that uncertainty should not matter, as long as well developed forward markets exist. The empirical implications of this result, however, are hard to find in the data. We model...

Gold traditionally has been used as a store of value and an inflation hedge. More recently, gold is also viewed as a hedge against uncertainty and a safe haven. This paper demonstrates that most of the properties regularly associated with gold are only valid within a simple regression framework...

This paper determines whether the world market risk, country-specific total risk, and country-specific idiosyncratic risk are priced in an international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM). The paper also tests if the price of risk associated with each factor is common across countries....

Firm size is an essential factor in examining the relation between returns and idiosyncratic volatilities. This paper documents that, when the idiosyncratic volatility is specified by firm size, the size-portfolio idiosyncratic volatility is statistically significant in explaining the future...