This paper compares market emergence in the Middle and East and North African (MENA) region with other emerging markets. We first consider the main components of market emergence, including the size, depth, activity, and transparency of the market, and proceed to a descriptive analysis....

Prior research suggests an inverse relationship between geographic distance and financial market linkages. In this paper, we examine whether and how cultural distance between countries mitigates this finding. We find that country-pairs exhibit higher linkages if they have smaller cultural...

An important puzzle in international finance is the failure of the forward exchange rate to be a rational forecast of the future spot rate. We document that even after accounting for nonstationarity, nonnormality, and heteroskedasticity using parametric and nonparametric tests on data for over a...

This paper analyzes the existence of flights from stocks to bonds and vice versa. We propose a definition and a test for flight-to-quality, flight-from-quality and cross-asset contagion and examine their characteristics and effects for the financial system. The empirical analysis for eight...

This paper models the monthly price volatilities of four precious metals (gold, silver, platinum and palladium prices) and investigates the macroeconomic determinants (business cycle, monetary environment and financial market sentiment) of these volatilities. Gold volatility is shown to be...

We investigate the volatility structure of gold, trading as a futures contract on the Chicago Board of Trade using intraday (high frequency) data from January 1999 to December 2005. Apart from investigating the now familiar GARCH properties we also utilize a rarely used measure of volatility -...

<heading format="display" id="h1" implicit="yes" level="1">Abstract</heading> As part of a broader financial development reform agenda, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries have successfully expanded and revitalised their stock markets over the last decade. Whereas previous contributions have investigated efficiency, international integration and...

This paper studies capital market integration in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries and its implications for international portfolio investment allocation. Starting with four cointegration methodologies, we significantly reject the hypothesis of a stable, long-run bivariate...

We investigate key macroeconomic factors that impact the price returns of precious metals markets. The markets investigated were gold, silver, platinum and palladium; whereas the macroeconomic factors accommodated business cycle, monetary environment and financial market sentiment factors. The...

The objective of this paper is to review the transmission mechanisms uniting equity market development and economic growth in developing countries. We find that the theoretical impact of equity markets is ambiguous. At the domestic level, the allocation function of equity markets appears...