This paper is concerned with the effect of enforced home bias on the development of emerging stock markets. It provides a detailed study of the impact on the Warsaw Stock Exchange of the Polish pension fund reforms and the associated restrictions on international investment. The time path of...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the annual and of the long-term performance of personal pension funds relative to their Primary Prospectus Benchmarks (PPBs) and T-bills. The study covers 9,659 personal pension funds from across all 30 ABI investment sectors that operated in the...

This paper brings together the academic literature on individual and institutional investors in order to understand the nature of difficulties faced by them and set the background for the Special Issue. This introductory article and the papers in the Special Issue contribute to the debate on how...

The role of employers in setting up and overseeing pension schemes offered to their employees and the quality of investment schemes offered to individual investors have attracted considerable attention in the finance literature. This paper adds to the debate by showing that institutional...

The paper contributes to the literature on integration of stock markets by addressing the issue of non-synchronous trading. We argue that controlling for time differences in trading hours of stock markets is important and show that time-adjustment improves estimates of market integration. We...

Theoretical and empirical studies show that deindustrialisation, broadly observed in developed countries, is an inherent part of the economic development pattern. However, post-communist countries, while being only middle-income economies, have also experienced deindustrialisation. Building on...

This paper sets the background to the Special Issue of the Journal of Empirical Finance on Challenges of Corporate Governance. It identifies the alternative approaches that can be taken to solve agency problems stemming from asymmetries of information: (i) ex-post monitoring through audit and...

Consumer confidence indices (CCIs) are a closely monitored barometer of countries' economic health, and an informative forecasting tool. Using European and US data, we provide a case study of the two recent stock market meltdowns (the post-dotcom bubble correction of 2000-2002 and the 2007-2009...

Independent directors are appointed to represent the interests of mutual fund shareholders. Yet, being in the employment of fund–families, the fulfilment of fiduciary duties of independent directors may be compromised. Using a large, hand-collected dataset of over 10,000 U.S. mutual funds, we...

In 2010, the Committee of European Securities Regulation (CESR) published the guidance on how to calculate the synthetic risk and reward indicator (SRRI) for Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) to improve disclosure and presentation of risk information in...