In light of the recently passed 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, we assess the effect of margin changes on prices, the risk-sharing between speculators and hedgers, and the price stability of 20 commodity futures markets. We find that margin increases decrease the rate at which prices change, yet they...

Purpose - This paper assesses the incidence of political institutions on stock market performance dynamics in Africa. Design/methodology/approach - The estimation technique used is a Two-Stage-Least Squares Instrumental Variable methodology. Channels of democracy, polity and autocracy are...

How do government policies and institutions affect stock market performance? As stock markets grow broader and deeper in African countries, the question becomes more critical. Government quality dynamics of corruption-control, government-effectiveness, political-stability or no violence, voice &...

This study investigates how well weekly Google search volumes track and predict bank failures in the United States between 2007 and 2012, contributing to the expanding literature that exploits internet data for the prediction of events. Different duration models with time-varying covariates are...

This paper investigates the stock returns and volatility size effects for firm performance in the Taiwan tourism industry, especially the impacts arising from the tourism policy reform that allowed mainland Chinese tourists to travel to Taiwan. Four conditional univariate GARCH models are used...

We exploit the introduction of free banking laws in US states during the 1837-1863 period to examine the impact of removing barriers to bank entry on bank competition and economic growth. As governments were not concerned about systemic stability in this period, we are able to isolate the...

The economic power of the euro countries should be strengthened by growth incentives, in the form of an additional European growth fund, which should also be funded by financial transaction tax revenues. The current level of debt requires a strengthening of government revenues. Taxes must be...

Over the past three years, as the euro area has struggled with high levels of sovereign debt, it has been gradually developing into a debt union. However, this is not a sustainable arrangement. This article proposes two alternatives to a debt union: a fiscal union and a monetary union with...

We examine the properties of a method for fixing Libor rates that is based on transactions data and multi-day sampling windows. The use of a sampling window may mitigate problems caused by thin transaction volumes in unsecured wholesale term funding markets. Using two partial data sets of loan...

A 2012 paper by Goodhart, Kashyap, Tsomocos, and Vardoulakis (GKTV) proposes a dynamic general equilibrium framework that provides a conceptual - and to some extent quantitative - framework for the analysis of macroprudential policies. The distinguishing feature of GKTV's paper relative to any...