What role does political influence play in access to finance? Using a comprehensive cross-country dataset, I characterize how and why domestic political connections affect firms' ability to access all types of finance — exploiting firms' cross-listing activity as a source of empirical...

This response to the 2009 UK White Paper on ‘Reforming Financial Markets' argues for stronger democratic oversight of regulators and for regulatory diversity in order to reduce ‘market herding' and the consequent systemic risks. In the context of hitherto weak democratic accountability and...

Carry trades are speculative activities which involve simultaneously going short a low-rate currency and long a high-rate currency. They are profitable as long as the gains from interest rate differentials are not offset by exchange rate movements. In this paper I investigate the dynamic...

This study investigates the ability of market beta, book-to-market equity, leverage, and earnings-price ratio to explain the cross-sectional variation in expected returns in the stock market of Sri Lanka. The sample of the study consists of a total of 88 companies which are listed on the Colombo...

This Article looks at the regulatory techniques that were adopted in a small but developed market, Canada, in response to the increasing integration of the North American economy and internationalization of capital markets. One of the most comprehensive experiments was the Multijurisdictional...

In the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis, and the criticism directed towards the International Monetary Fund, in particular, for not having seen it coming, the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) was created in 1999 under a mandate from the G7 ministers of finance and central bank governors....

The year 2009 is a propitious time to evaluate systems of investor protection in financial markets as global bank losses exceed the 1 trillion mark and market losses equally exceed the 1 trillion mark. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union enacted sweeping legislation to...

It is commonly argued that China's financial markets are effectively insulated from the rest of the world. To see if this is true and to better understand China's financial development, we analyze China's integration with major financial markets. Using conditional copulas, we show that China has...

We test whether foreign demand matters for local house prices in the US using an identification strategy based on the existence of 'home bias abroad' in international real estate markets. Following an extreme political crisis event abroad, a proxy for a strong and exogenous shift in foreign...

We analyse euro area investors' portfolio rebalancing during the ECB's Asset Purchase Programme at the security level. Our empirical analysis shows that euro area investors (in particular investment funds and households) actively rebalanced away from securities targeted under the Public Sector...