Sector level cost of equity in African financial markets

This paper assesses the effectiveness of Liu (2006) metrics in measuring illiquidity within a multifactor CAPM pricing model. Costs of equity are estimated using this model for the major sectors within Africa's larger equity markets: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa. In all countries, the cost of equity is found to be highest in the financial sector and lowest in the blue chip stocks of Tunisia, Morocco, Namibia and South Africa. At an aggregate level, Nigeria and Zambia have the highest cost of capital.     

Financial liberalization and banking crises in emerging economies

Financial liberalization often leads to financial crises. This link has usually been attributed to poorly designed banking systems, an explanation that is largely static. In this paper we develop a dynamic explanation, by modelling the evolution of a newly-liberalized bank's opportunities and incentives to take on risk over time. The model reveals that even if a banking system is well-designed, in the sense of having good long-run properties, many countries will enjoy an initial period of rapid, low-risk growth and then enter a period with an elevated risk of banking crisis. This transition emerges because of the way in which the degree of foreign competition, the marginal product of capital, and the bank's own net worth simultaneously evolve.     

Foreign listings, corporate governance, and equity valuations

This paper analyzes the impact of foreign listing on equity valuations and relates it to an improvement in corporate governance. It documents abnormal returns around the announcement to list foreign shares on the London Stock Exchange. These are partially explained by a reduction of agency costs that is consistent with the enhanced monitoring and investor protection that prevail in a superior information and legal environment. The results are consistent with predictions derived from theoretical models of agency costs and illustrate an interesting implication of more open global equity markets.     

State institutions, risk, and lending in global capital markets

This paper examines one component of the expansion of global capitalism, the lending of capital across national borders and the affect of national political institutions and arrangements upon that lending. Global capital markets expanded rapidly during the latter part of the twentieth century, prompting discussions about the role of mobile capital. This contribution makes three key points to the understanding of globalization, its impacts, its causes, and its relationship to the nation-state, business and development. First, globalization is an uneven, bifurcated, phenomenon. Only a select group access these global capital markets, while many watch from the sidelines. Second, national political arrangements help us understand systematic disparities in access to global capital. National and local public policies, national political institutions, and other local activities prove instrumental in affecting access to global capital. Democracy and regulatory stability matter as they provide information to international investors about the risk to investments from local arenas. Third, the data presents a methodological obstacle in understanding how politics affects access to global capital. The structure of the data’s distribution can hide real relationships and pervert substantive interpretations if not managed. Without addressing the statistical concerns presented by the data the results would at worst be little more than garbage in, garbage out, and at best misleading.     

Real-time price discovery in global stock, bond and foreign exchange markets

Using a unique high-frequency futures dataset, we characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. We find that news produces conditional mean jumps; hence high-frequency stock, bond and exchange rate dynamics are linked to fundamentals. Equity markets, moreover, react differently to news depending on the stage of the business cycle, which explains the low correlation between stock and bond returns when averaged over the cycle. Hence our results qualify earlier work suggesting that bond markets react most strongly to macroeconomic news; in particular, when conditioning on the state of the economy, the equity and foreign exchange markets appear equally responsive. Finally, we also document important contemporaneous links across all markets and countries, even after controlling for the effects of macroeconomic news.     

Exchange rate regimes and foreign exchange exposure: The case of emerging market firms

We investigate the influence of exchange rate regimes on the foreign exchange exposure of emerging market firms. Using a sample of 1523 firms from 20 countries for the period December 1999 to December 2010, we find that about half of the firms are significantly exposed to exchange rate fluctuations. We find that non-floating exchange rate arrangements are associated with more widespread exposure as well as a greater magnitude of firms' exposure. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that the exchange rate regime is an important determinant of firm-level exchange rate exposure for emerging market firms, and that pegged exchange rate regimes amplify exposure. This result holds after controlling for a wide range of potential determinants of firm-level and country-level foreign exchange exposure. Our findings suggest that exchange rate regime matters at the micro as well as the macro level; non-floating regimes fail to protect firms from exchange rate exposure.     

The relevance of currency risk in the EMU

We investigate how the elimination of intra-European exchange risk may affect international financial markets using a conditional version of the International CAPM. We estimate the EMU and non-EMU components of aggregate currency risk and document significant exposures to both. The premium for EMU risk is positive and associated with exposure to the French, Italian and Spanish currencies. The premium for non-EMU risk is consistently negative and accounts for most of the aggregate currency premiums. In the 1990s, exposures to EMU risk declined significantly while exposures to non-EMU risk increased. Hence the adoption of the Euro is unlikely to have a large impact on aggregate currency risk premiums.     

Exchange rate management in emerging markets: Intervention via an electronic limit order book

This paper describes and analyzes the implementation of a crawling exchange rate band on an electronic trading platform. The placement of limit orders at the central bank's target rate serves as a credible policy statement that may coordinate beliefs of market participants. We find for our sample that intervention increases exchange rate volatility (and spread) for the next minutes but that intervention days show a lower degree of volatility (and spread) than non-intervention days. We also show for intraday data that the price impact of interbank order flow is smaller on intervention days than on non-intervention days. These stabilizing effects, however, rely on the conditions of large currency reserves and the existence of capital controls; an electronic market seems to support this goal.     

Consumption smoothing,risk sharing and financial integration

Theories indicate that financial integration should allow economies to better share risk and thus improve consumption smoothing. We construct two widely used price‐based measures of financial integration (i.e., the standard correlation and the adjusted R‐squared) and test whether consumption volatility declines as international equity markets become more integrated. Pooled and panel estimates for three different groups of countries (i.e., G7, G20 and EU) provide no significant evidence of improved consumption smoothing as financial integration rises. This evidence is supported by a battery of robustness checks and holds over time. Taken together, our results suggest that convergence in international equity prices does not necessarily represent the channel through which risk‐sharing opportunities arise or consumption smoothing improves.     

Exchange rate effects of US government shutdowns: Evidence from both developed and emerging markets

We examine the exchange rate effects of US government shutdowns using historical exchange rate data covering 19 episodes of government shutdowns. We find that major currency exchange rates generally tend to appreciate vis-à-vis the US dollar, and foreign exchange volatility tends to increase in response to shutdowns. We show that the effect of shutdowns is felt most one day after a shutdown and the effect dies out for most currencies within five days of a shutdown. These results pass a range of robustness tests which control for day-of-the-week effects, model specifications, and the Global Financial Crisis.     

Sovereign credit ratings,capital flows and financial sector development in emerging markets

How does the sovereign credit ratings history provided by independent ratings agencies affect domestic financial sector development and international capital inflows to emerging countries? We address this question utilizing a comprehensive dataset of sovereign credit ratings from Standard and Poor's from 1995–2003 for a cross-section of 51 emerging markets. Within a panel data estimation framework, we examine financial sector development and the influence of sovereign credit ratings provision, controlling for various economic and corporate governance factors identified in the financial development literature. We find strong evidence that our sovereign credit rating measures do affect financial intermediary sector developments and capital flows. We find that i) long-term foreign currency sovereign credit ratings are important for encouraging financial intermediary development and for attracting capital flows. ii) Long-term local currency ratings stimulate domestic market growth but discourage international capital flows. iii) Short-term ratings (both foreign and local currency denominated) retard all forms of financial developments and capital flows. There are important implications in this research for policy makers to encourage the provision of longer-term credit ratings to promote financial development in emerging economies.     

Currency Prices, the Nominal Exchange Rate, and Security Prices in a Two‐Country Dynamic Monetary Equilibrium

This paper examines a continuous‐time two‐country dynamic monetary equilibrium in which countries with possibly heterogeneous tastes and endowments hold their own money for the purpose of transaction services formulated via money in the utility function. Given a price system, no‐arbitrage pricing results are provided for the price of each money and the nominal exchange rate. Characterizations are provided for equilibrium prices for general time‐additive preferences and non‐Markovian exogenous processes. Under a Markovian structure of model primitives, the currency prices are shown to solve a bivariate system of partial differential equations. Assuming that each country is endowed with heterogeneous separable power utility and the exogenous quantities all follow geometric Brownian motions, an equilibrium is shown to exist and additional characterization is provided. A further example of nonseparable Cobb–Douglas preferences is investigated. The additional features over the customary environment of homogeneous logarithmic preferences are emphasized.     

International capital flows,returns and world financial integration

International capital flows have increased dramatically since the 1980s, with much of the increase being due to trade in equity and bond markets. Such developments are often attributed to the increased integration of world financial markets. We present a model that allows us to examine how greater integration in world financial markets affects the behavior of international capital flows and financial returns. Our model predicts that international capital flows are large (in absolute value) and very volatile during the early stages of financial integration when international asset trading is concentrated in bonds. As integration progresses and households gain access to world equity markets, the size and volatility of international bond flows decline. This is the natural outcome of greater risk sharing facilitated by increased integration. This pattern is consistent with declining volatility observed during 1975–2007 period in the G-7 countries. We also find that the equilibrium flows in bonds and stocks predicted by the model are larger than their empirical counterparts, and are largely driven by variations in equity risk premia. The model also predicts that volatility of equity and bond returns decline with integration, again consistent with the data for G-7 economies.     

Desire,need, and obligation: Examining commitment to luxury brands in emerging markets

The availability of a wide variety of luxury brands has resulted in declining commitment toward a single brand. Enhancing brand commitment has, therefore, become a significant challenge for international businesses and marketing managers. We develop a multi–dimensional brand commitment framework underpinned by marketing, organizational, and social psychology literature streams. The simultaneous examination of brand–commitment dimensions based on consumer desire, need, and obligation in our framework offers a novel perspective that advances research on brand commitment. Our findings demonstrate stability of the framework in important emerging markets for luxury brands, namely China, India, Russia, Turkey, and Thailand. The framework, incorporating affective, continuance, and normative brand commitment dimensions, offers a conceptually robust fit. We demonstrate that each brand commitment dimension is influenced by distinct antecedents, and we show the direct and interactional impact of consumers’ emotional attachment, economic motivations, and normative pressures on purchase intentions. Supported by well-established theories in organizational and social psychology, our study offers new insights on how consumers commit to brands. We provide international brand managers with a blueprint for strengthening brand commitment across countries.     

Exploring and investigating sustainable international business practices by MNEs in emerging markets

While there are a number of dimensions to sustainability, ranging from the environmental to the social, a common assumption in the literature is that firms from the mature markets are more likely to have the capacity and indeed, rationale to take sustainability more seriously. Emerging market counterparts, MNEs included, are seen to lag behind in sustainable practices. However, recent developments challenge this conventional wisdom. This article introduces the special issue on ‘Sustainable International Business Practices by MNEs in Emerging Markets, and highlights emerging themes which are promising future directions for theoretical and empirical enquiry.     

Interactive effects of information exchange,relationship capital and environmental uncertainty on international joint venture (IJV) performance: An emerging markets perspective

Prior research on the role of international joint ventures (IJV) in the emerging markets generally ignores the impact of information exchange on IJV performance as well as the mediating role of relationship capital (a key measure of competitive dynamics and co-evolution) and the moderating impact of environmental uncertainty in this process. This paper addresses these important research gaps by exploring the direct effect of information exchange on IJV performance as well as indirect (mediated) effect through mutual trust and reciprocal commitment, two key components of relationship capital. In addition, this paper investigates the role of environmental uncertainty as a moderator of these mediating effects. Results from a study of 205 contractual IJVs in China, a highly competitive and dynamic emerging market, show that foreign and local partners collaborate and co-evolve through regular information exchange that helps them build relationship capital with each other in the form of mutual trust and reciprocal commitment, which in turn leads to better IJV performance. In addition, environmental uncertainty negatively moderates (weakens) the positive effects of information exchange on mutual trust and reciprocal commitment but not their impact on IJV performance. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for future research on the role of relationship capital in the successful formation and management of IJVs in the emerging markets.     

金融危机下国际生产体系对全球贸易的冲击及福利影响

从国际生产和世界贸易两个层面分析并测算了当今世界生产和贸易的最新特点和进展,揭示了两大体系的紧密联系。在外部需求下降的情况下,垂直专业化生产对国际贸易尤其是中间产品贸易造成了负面影响,金融危机通过垂直的国际生产格局对国际贸易的破坏作用放大了。由于供应链的断裂会造成价值链上多个国家进出口贸易的下降,并对深层次参与垂直专业化生产的发展中国家和发达国家的福利造成损失。     

隐性交易成本与资产定价——基于上证180指数成份股票交易数据的实证研究

文章利用上证180指数成份股票的高频数据计算隐性交易成本,探讨其与资产定价的关系。发现:(1)隐性交易成本与换手率、规模和收益率都存在着明显的线性负相关关系。在股票收益率下降时期,隐性交易成本通过流动性深度成本间接影响股票收益率。(2)较之隐性交易成本,规模因素与换手率因素对收益率的影响有着更好的测度性。很可能是因为这两个因素与流动性深度成本也有着显著相关性。(3)隐性交易成本与规模因素整体上呈线性负相关关系,分段上的关系则很可能是凹函数与凸函数的组合。     

Exchange rate policies in Asia in an era of financial globalisation: An empirical assessment

Ebbs and flows of capital have complicated macroeconomic policy management for all emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) regardless of whether they have adopted flexible or managed exchange rate regimes. In the light of the renewed interest in the trilemma versus dilemma debate, we contribute to the related literature by presenting an empirical analysis of exchange rate flexibility and intervention for selected Asian EMDEs over the time period 2001–2016. In addition to estimating augmented Frankel–Wei regressions, we employ a generalised auto‐regressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model to assess the extent of foreign exchange (FX) intervention and whether there exist any asymmetries in the way countries intervene. Our results show that although there is greater flexibility in exchange rates, there is evidence of some countries potentially using FX intervention to manage currency movements. We also find evidence of asymmetry in intervention where exchange rate volatility responds more emphatically to FX sales than purchases.     

Oil Price Volatility,the Global Financial Crisis,and the Day-of-the-Week Effect

In this study the author investigated the day-of-the-week effect in the UK Brent crude oil market using the GARCH (1, 5) and GJR-GARCH (1, 5) models. The backdrop of the study is the Asian and global financial crises of 1997 and 2008, respectively. Daily data were used over the period of January 2, 1997, to May 27, 2009. Results show the presence of the day-of-the-week effect in both return and volatility in the oil market. More specifically, there are significant positive Thursday and Friday effects in return and significant Thursday effects in volatility.