Using the conditional Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), this paper tests for the existence and pattern of contagion and capital market integration in global equity markets. Contagion is defined as significant excess conditional correlation among different countries' asset returns above what...

We test the investor recognition hypothesis through an examination of the high volume return premium across countries. Our cross-country tests are consistent with the hypothesis in that we find the magnitude of the premium is associated with market characteristics that relate to the importance...

We use partisan and opportunistic political business cycle (quot;PBCquot;) considerations to develop and test a framework for explaining election-period changes in credit spreads for developing country sovereign bonds. Pre-election bond spread trends are significantly linked both to the partisan...

During the last two decades, many emerging markets have embarked on a course of economic reform, including stock market liberalization. This paper addresses the question of whether these markets have become more informationally efficient in the years following liberalization. We find that...

This paper tries to identify the risks embodied in foreign-currency denominated sovereign bond spreads. It adopts an instrumental variables method , which attributes the explanatory power of fundamentals in a spread equation to their predictive power for observed risk realizations. Using...

The study of transparency is increasingly a more topical, broadly relevant, but also more under-researched enterprise. The Asian financial crisis has highlighted not only the welfare consequences of financial sector transparency, sparking a series of yet unresolved debates, but has also linked...

Levy-Yeyati, Martinez Peria, and Schmukler show that systemic risk exerts a significant impact on the behavior of depositors, sometimes overshadowing their responses to standard bank fundamentals. Systemic risk can affect market discipline both regardless of and through bank fundamentals. First,...

This paper utilizes a new data set from AllianceBernstein that, unlike other corporate governance data, has monthly-updated firm-level governance ratings for 21 emerging markets countries for almost a five year period. With these unique data, we examine how changes in corporate governance...

Using data from 56 markets, we find that short-term reversal, post-earnings drift, and momentum strategies earn similar profits in emerging and developed markets. Portfolio-level variance ratios and market delay measures show greater deviations from efficiency in developed markets and firm-level...

This paper examines a unique data set consisting of Japanese equity returns for the Friday, Monday, and Tuesday surrounding U.S. Monday holiday closures. The objective is to neutralize the impact of spillover effects from New York to Tokyo. Prior studies find that Japanese returns are negative...