This note examines the weak-form market efficiency of Latin American equity markets. Daily returns for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela are examined for random walks using serial correlation coefficient and runs tests, Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF), Phillips-Perron...

This paper demonstrates how the presence of a lower interest rate expectations detected in short-term interest rate futures during the 1990’s allowed arbitrage profits when trading intra-commodity spread differentials on the Sydney Futures Exchange’s 90 Day Bank Accepted Bill futures...

This paper examines the impact of natural disasters on the Australian equity market. The data set employed consists of daily price and accumulation returns over the period 31 December 1982 to 1 January 2002 for the All Ordinaries Index (AOI) and a record of forty-two severe storms, floods,...

Malkiel and Xu (1997) state that idiosyncratic volatility is highly correlated with size and that it plays a powerful role in explaining expected returns. In this paper we ask (a) whether idiosyncratic volatility is useful in explaining the variation in expected returns; and, (b) whether our...

The Iranian rial has been depreciated on average about 12 per cent per annum during the last four decades. This paper examines the long- and short-run determinants of the black market exchange rate employing the cointegration techniques and the annual time series data from 1960 to 2000. Broadly...

In this paper we study an overlapping-generations model in which agents� mortality risks, and consequently impatience, are endogenously determined by private and public investment in health care. The proportion of revenues allocated for public health care is also endogenous, determined as...

A significant body of literature on developed countries support the view that disequilibrium in the money market can affect the future output gap and/or inflation. This paper examines the major determinants of the demand for real money balances in eight developing countries for which consistent...

In this study, productivity growth in thirty-five Australian universities is investigated using nonparametric frontier techniques over the period 1998 to 2003. The inputs included in the analysis are full-time equivalent academic and non-academic staff, non-labour expenditure and undergraduate...

In this paper we compare the performance of the traditional CAPM with the multifactor model of Fama and French (1996) for equities listed in the Shanghai Stock Exchange. We also investigate the explanatory power of idiosyncratic volatility and respond to the claim that multifactor model findings...

This paper analyses the effectiveness of foreign exchange intervention by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). Initially, a latent factor model is used to decompose the volatility of exchange rates into three unobserved factors - world, numeraire and idiosyncratic. Subsequently, the impact of...