Cross-Listings and Home Market Trading Volume: The Case of Malaysia and Singapore

Cross‐listings of equities internationally are becoming more common. Using data for Europe and North America, previous studies reject the order flow diversion hypothesis, which states that international cross‐listings reduce home‐country trading volume. We test this hypothesis using data for equities cross‐listed in Singapore and Malaysia. We find that trading volume in Malaysia fell 42.9% when Singapore markets were closed for holidays. Furthermore, we show that trading volume in Malaysia did not increase following the implementation of regulations that ended the trading of Malaysian equities in Singapore in 1998. Hence, we reject the order flow diversion hypothesis.     

Financial Development and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence from Six MENA Countries

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth for six Middle Eastern and North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia), within a quadvariate vector autoregressive framework. We employ four different measures of financial development and apply the augmented vector autoregression vector (VAR) methodology of Toda and Yamamoto to test for Granger causality. Our empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that finance leads to growth in five out of the six countries. Only in Israel could weak support be found for causality running from economic growth to financial development but no causality in the other direction. These findings suggest the need to accelerate the financial reforms that have been launched since the mid 1980s and to improve the efficiency of these countries’ financial systems to stimulate saving/investment and, consequently, long‐term economic growth.     

Hierarchical Arrow Social Welfare Functions

Supported by SNF Grant No: DMS 8803556.     

Ecosystems,externalities, and economies

This paper incorporates an ecosystem model into a model of a simple economy. The decisionmaking agents in the ecosystem are individual organisms aggregated to the species level. A species may provide utility directly to humans, or it may provide utility indirectly because it is used either as a raw material in goods fabrication or as sustenance for other species. We describe a comparative static equilibrium of the ecosystem where species' demands for other species are equal to the supplies of those other species, and energy is conserved. The ecosystem is then embedded in the economy so that the effects of human intervention can be traced through both the ecosystem and the economy. Human intervention creates ecosystem externalities such that ecosystem equilibria are shifted and the new equilibria affect the utility or the production processes of other humans. This framework allows us to describe in principle which ecosystem services can be efficiently usurped by humans, which waste flows can be efficiently allowed into ecosystems, and which ecosystem organisms and physical attributes can be efficiently maintained.     

Directly measuring early exercise premiums using American and European S&P 500 Index options

The Chicago Board Options Exchange concurrently listed European‐style and American‐style options on the Standard and Poor's 500 Index from April 2, 1986 through June 20, 1986. This unique time period allows for a direct measurement of the early exercise premium in American‐style index options. In this study, using ask quotes, we find average early exercise premiums ranging from 5.04 to 5.90% for calls, and from 7.97 to 10.86% for puts. Additionally, we are able to depict a potentially useful functional form of the early exercise premium. As in previous studies, we find some instances of negative early exercise premiums. However, a trading simulation shows that traders must be able to trade within the bid–ask spread to profit from these apparent arbitrage opportunities. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 23:287–313, 2003     

Looking for contagion in currency futures markets

This article tests whether there are pure contagion effects in both conditional means and volatilities among British pound, Canadian dollar, Deutsche mark, and Swiss franc futures markets during the 1992 ERM crisis. A conditional version of international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) in the absence of purchasing power parity (PPP) is used to control for economic fundamentals. The empirical results indicate that overall there are no mean spillovers among those futures markets, but they are detected during the crisis period. That is, past return shocks originating in any one of the four markets have no impact on the other three markets during the entire sample period, suggesting that these markets are weak‐form efficient. However, this weak‐form market efficiency fails to hold during the market turmoil, especially for British pound and Swiss franc, and the sources of contagion‐in‐mean effects are mainly due to the return shocks originating in three European currency futures markets. As for the contagion‐in‐volatility, it is detected for British pound only because its conditional volatility is influenced by the negative volatility shocks from Canadian dollar, Deutsche mark, and Swiss franc, with Deutsche mark playing the dominant role in generating these shocks. JEL Classifications: C32; F31; G12. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 23:957–988, 2003