Prior research documented that U.S. stock prices tend to grow faster during Democratic administrations than during Republican administrations. This letter examines whether stock returns in other countries also depend on the political orientation of the incumbents. An analysis of 24 stock markets...

What are the drivers of the large Target2 (T2) balances that have emerged in the European Monetary Union since the start of the financial crisis in 2007? This paper examines the extent to which the evolution of national T2 balances can be statistically associated with cross-border financial...

We analyse the extent to which prices in the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) and bond markets reflect the same information on credit risk in the context of the current crisis of the European Monetary Union (EMU). We first document that deviations between CDS and bond spreads are related to...

This study examines return predictability of major foreign exchange rates by testing for martingale difference hypothesis (MDH) using daily and weekly nominal exchange rates from 1975 to 2009. We use three alternative tests for the MDH, which include the wild bootstrap automatic variance ratio...

The Asia-Pacific region’s currency markets are generally efficient within-country when tested using the Johansen (1991, 1995) cointegration technique whereas market efficiency fails to hold when tested using Fama’s (1984) conventional regression. Using the Pilbeam and Olmo (2011) model, we...

In the framework of small-scale agent-based financial market models, the paper starts out from the concept of structural stochastic volatility, which derives from different noise levels in the demand of fundamentalists and chartists and the time-varying market shares of the two groups. It...

We examine the effect of US and European news announcements on the spillover of volatility across US and European stock markets. Using synchronously observed international implied volatility indices at a daily frequency, we find significant spillovers of implied volatility between US and...

Several transition countries have experienced strong real exchange rate appreciations. This paper tests the hypothesis that these appreciations reflect underlying productivity gains in the tradable sector. Using panel data over the period 1993–98, the results show clear evidence of...

The portfolio theory and the basic ideas of Markowitz can be applied to currency investments as well as to classical asset classes as shares or bonds. The question whether currency investments can be treated as efficient asset classes is not finally answered in theory and practice. This article...

This paper investigates hedging and risk management options in the energy sector. Energy firms tend to adopt risk management tools in order to cover their financial exposure. Taking into consideration that current crisis has a significant effect on their value; we check whether energy firms...