Purpose The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a fundamental cause of market booms and busts is that investor risk attitudes change during market booms. Specifically, the authors propose that an investor’s risk aversion falls as (s)he attempts to “keep up with the Joneses.” This...

Purpose – This paper aims to open a dialogue between academic accounts of the subprime crisis and The Life of Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare. Design/methodology/approach – Andre Orlean’s analysis of the crisis published in 2009 is closely examined to trace the ways in which it...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the off‐balance sheet (OBS) behavior of a sample of small commercial banks in the USA in 2006. In particular, it aims to study the impact that monitoring intensity has on bank OBS usage. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a...

Purpose – The current paper contributes to the vigorous debate about policies and regulations that would shield financial markets' participants from future events of the financial turmoil. In doing so, the paper aims to broaden the picture of the financial crisis contagion and set it against...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test whether the volatility of regional stock markets’ is common or country-specific for 46 international markets of the Asian, European, African and Latin American regions using the Morgan Stanley Capital International daily prices in the period...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to construct a financial conditions index (FCI) for the South African economy to enable the gauging of financial conditions and to better understand the macro-financial linkages in the country. The global financial crisis that began in 2007-2008...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to: investigate whether the foreign institutional investors in Taiwan herd towards the stocks in the same industry; identify the causes of industrial herding; analyze whether herding behavior impacts future industrial returns; and trace the changing...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the performance of three alternative value‐at‐risk (VaR) models to provide suitable estimates for measuring and forecasting market risk. The data sample consists of five international developed and emerging stock market indices over the...