The Credit Default Swap market contagion during recent crises: international evidence

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We test the hypothesis that underwriters set higher gross spreads and deeper offer price discounts in seasoned equity offers of firms exhibiting weak...     

Empirical test of the efficiency of the UK covered warrants market: Stochastic dominance and likelihood ratio test approach

This paper represents the first attempt to apply a stochastic dominance (SD) approach to examine the efficiency of the UK covered warrants market. Our empirical analyses reveal that neither covered warrants nor their underlying shares stochastically dominate the other, indicating the nonexistence of potential arbitrage gains in either wealth or utility, which implies market efficiency. To complement the SD results, we also employ a likelihood ratio (LR) test to examine information efficiency. A bootstrap methodology is developed to correct the size distortion of the LR test. Our findings show that UK covered warrant returns efficiently reflect the return information of the underlying shares.     

A strong hysteretic model of Okun’s Law: theory and a preliminary investigation

This paper presents a ‘strong hysteretic’ version of Okun’s Law, that is, a version of the law in which ‘history matters.’ In this version of the link between fluctuations in unemployment and growth, the most important past growth shock exerts an influence on the current unemployment rate. A theoretical framework is proposed in order to lay the foundations of this version of Okun’s Law. In this framework, the hysteresis property arises because a large number of heterogeneous firms discontinuously adjust their activity levels in response to fluctuations in the rate of growth. The foundations having been laid, a method for empirically testing our hysteretic Okun’s Law is presented. An algorithm permits construction of a hysteresis operator, which synthesizes, for every moment, the growth shocks that have remained in the memory bank of the unemployment rate. Empirical tests are conducted to assess the empirical relevance of this version of Okun’s Law, as compared to the more familiar linear relationship. Empirical results consistent with hysteresis are found for several of the countries in our sample.