We study the role of financial market development in the financing choice of firms in developing countries using a dynamic panel approach with aggregate firm-level data. The results suggest that equity market development favors firms’ equity financing over debt financing, while banking sector development favors debt financing over equity financing, as one would expect. However, surprisingly, eq...

The internet revolution is said to foster integration of the market for financial services, since consumers are able to shop around at all companies worldwide and firms can easily offer their services on the internet at a minimum of distribution cost. However, the European market for online brokerage displays a different picture. Prices paid for online brokerage differ substantially across Euro...

Article history: Received 5 February 2012 Received in revised form 15 October 2012 Accepted 31 December 2012 Available online 8 January 2013 We examine the influence of auditors onmitigating corporate fraud in China, which is known to have weak legal enforcement, weak investor protection along with tight control of the media and labour unions. We find that firmswith executives that have lower i...

Article history: Received 29 February 2012 Received in revised form 31 July 2013 Accepted 5 August 2013 Available online 20 August 2013 This paper examines the comovement between the Chinese and US stock markets over the period between January 4, 2000 and January 13, 2012. We show that there is no cointegration relationship between the two markets, even when allowing for structural change. Thei...

Article history: Received 16 August 2013 Accepted 23 September 2013 Available online 29 September 2013 We examine the relationship between an Internet-based corporate disclosure index and firm value in the seven largest stock markets of Latin America. We find, after controlling for firms' characteristics, industry and country of origin, that an increase of 1% in the InternetBased Corporate Disc...

Long memory (long-term dependence) seems to be as widespread in financial time series as in nature. Inspired by the long memory property, Multi-fractal processes have recently been introduced as a new tool for modeling the stylized facts in financial time series. In this paper, we attempt to construct a bivariate multi-fractal model, and implement its estimation via both GMM and likelihood appr...

Article history: Received 29 August 2012 Received in revised form 21 May 2013 Accepted 6 August 2013 Available online 15 August 2013 We test the impact of idiosyncratic risk on stock returns for emerging markets that experience financial market liberalizations. Idiosyncratic risk is positively associated with returns prior to financial market liberalization, but liberalization diminishes this e...

This paper examines KOSPI200 index option prices in order to investigate whether index option implied volatilities foreshadowed the 1997 economic crisis in Korea. Results indicate the absence of strong fears of an impending market downturn prior to the crisis. Put option implied volatilities rose sharply as the crisis intensified, however, and the difference between put and call implied volatil...

Article history: Received 14 May 2013 Received in revised form 21 January 2015 Accepted 22 January 2015 Available online 30 January 2015 This paper examines the effect of a firm's crash-risk exposure on its speed of leverage adjustment (SOA), and how this effect is influenced by the information environment of the country in which the firm is located.We employ a panel of 19,247 firms across 41 c...

In this study a regime switching approach is applied to estimate the chartist and fundamentalist (c&f) exchange rate model originally proposed by Frankel and Froot (1986). The empirical results suggest that this model does successfully explain daily DM/Dollar forward exchange rate dynamics from 1982 to 1998. Moreover, our findings turned out to be relative robust by estimating the model in subs...