Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the trade relationship among Pacific Rim Asian economies and the U.S. with an attempt at understanding the fundamental causes for the contagious effects of the Asian financial crisis. East Asian economies trade extensively among themselves and with the U.S. This great dependence on foreign trade and investments has considerably increased the instability of the economies and financial markets in this region. It is found that the impact of the financial crisis on a domestic economy is positively correlated with its trade relationship with foreign economies. The importance of the trade relationship is manifested in the financial markets. Results show that the returns and volatility of a stock market are significantly influenced by the markets of its major trading partners. Also, foreign exchange markets often significantly interact with stock markets, especially following the Asian financial crisis. Furthermore, the Japanese and Hong Kong markets, instead of the U.S. market, had a dominating effect on East Asian financial markets during the period of the financial crisis.

AbstractThis paper extends the risk‐neutrality default model of municipal bonds to consider the effect of risk aversion on the estimation of default probability. A model is proposed to separate the default risk assessment from the investor's risk aversion. Empirical results show that the risk‐neutrality model consistently overestimates the default probability but that the magnitude of this overestimate is generally small and statistically insignificant.

AbstractWe examine the composition of return volatility, serial correlation, and trading costs before and after decimalization on the New York Stock Exchange. We decompose the variance of price changes into components associated with public news, rounding errors, and market‐making frictions. We find that when stocks move from a fractional to a decimal trading system, the variance components due to market‐making frictions and rounding errors decline significantly, whereas the component due to public news remains unchanged. The serial correlation of price changes weakens substantially after decimalization. The uninformed component of bid‐ask spreads decreases significantly whereas the informed component has no significant change.

AbstractWe report further evidence of the difference in execution costs between Nasdaq and the NYSE before and after the 1997 market reforms. We find that informed trading costs are consistently higher on Nasdaq both before and after the reforms. In the pre‐reform period the Nasdaq‐NYSE disparity in bid‐ask spreads cannot be completely attributed to the difference in informed trading costs. However, in the post‐reform period the spread difference between these two markets becomes insignificant with the effect of informed trading costs controlled. Our findings are consistent with the contention that the reforms have largely reduced noninformation trading costs and dealers' rents.

This paper examines the relationship between financial market development and economic growth. By pooling the data of both developed and developing countries, we test the relation between the real GDP growth rate and financial development variables suggested by the aggregate capital endogenous growth model. We find that the capital absorption and saving rates have a significant positive relation with economic growth whereas the interest rate has a negative relation. Since the behavior of these explanatory variables reflects financial development, our results suggest that financial intermediation plays a significant role in economic growth. Furthermore, we find that there was a shift in the economic performance of Asian developing economies in the 1980s. Financial reforms in this region have resulted in a transitory adverse impact on the capital absorption rate. It also appears that economic growth has slowed down recently for most of these newly industrialized economies. Our result suggests that the lack of efficient financial markets may have hindered the economic performance of these economies.

AbstractThis paper explores the economic nature of return factors by incorporating a multifactor return generating process into the traditional CAPM. It attempts to remedy the arbitrage pricing theory, which is not capable of assigning proper economic meanings to return factors. There are at least three significant factors associated with general production, investment, financial, and employment variables. These economic factors explain the risk‐return relationship as well as those obtained by the arbitrage pricing theory.

This paper examines the informational role of trades in the corporate bond market. Using transaction data, we compare the temporal relation between volume and volatility of returns for both bonds and stocks issued by the same firms. We find a dramatic difference between these two securities. While there is a strong positive relation between return volatility and volume for stocks, this relation is much weaker for corporate bonds. This finding holds not only for straight bonds but also for callable and convertible bonds. Empirical evidence reveals a very different relation between volatility and volume in the corporate bond market than predicted by standard microstructure models. Results show that the role of volume and trade frequency can be quite different across asset classes.