Overnight public information,order placement,and price discovery during the pre-opening period

This study examines the impact of corporate news announcements released overnight on price discovery during the pre-opening period in the Australian Securities Exchange. Our results suggest that the presence of these announcements increases the efficiency of indicative opening prices and that the intensity of these announcements significantly influences the aggressiveness of pre-opening orders. Using earnings announcements to compare the speed of price adjustments in response to overnight and daytime information of a homogeneous type, we find that prices respond immediately to overnight news upon the commencement of trading, whereas adjustments based on trading-hours news tend not to be instantaneous. Overall, our evidence highlights the important role of the pre-opening period in price discovery and the prospect of further enhancing this role by timing the release of public information to occur during non-trading hours.     

Network ties and export propensity of Vietnamese small and medium enterprises

This paper investigates the impacts of different network ties on export propensity of Vietnamese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the manufacturing sector. Using data from a survey of over 2,600 manufacturing SMEs in 2015, we found that social networks contribute positively to the export propensity of SMEs, while the size of business networks negatively associates with the likelihood of export. However, bank networks and political networks are not significant for the propensity to export of Vietnamese SMEs. We discuss the results in detail and offer recommendations for SME owners, managers and policy makers.     

Institutions for private sector development and pro‐poor growth: Evidence from Vietnam

Using the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey 2008, we explore the differences in pro‐poor growth performance in provinces in Vietnam according to the quality of the provinces’ institutions that support private sector activity. We exploit the localized and varying effect of French colonial legacy across Vietnamese provinces to address the endogeneity of institutions. We find strong and robust evidence of a positive effect of good‐quality institutions that support private sector activity on pro‐poor growth and that enhanced working hours and hourly wage and extended income from non‐farm self‐employment play critical roles in this outcome.     

Shipping cost and development of the landlocked developing countries: Panel evidence from the common correlated effects approach

We estimate the impact of shipping cost on development for landlocked developing countries (LLDCs). Since container trade is important to them, we construct a country-specific measure of shipping cost, called HarpexCost, which combines the global cost of container shipping with information on how exposed to container shipping each LLDC is. We employ the common correlated effects (CCE) estimator of Pesaran (Econometrica, 2006; 55: 967) to first estimate the impact of HarpexCost on the LLDCs’ development, and then recover the actual impact of shipping cost from these estimates. Overall, we observe that shipping cost has large negative effects on the LLDCs. Building upon these results, we provide new estimates on the cost of landlockedness and how trade benefits their development.     

Gender differences in formal credit approaches: rural households in Vietnam

In Vietnam, women have poorer access to formal credit than men. This article determines the extent to which borrowing constraints restrict women’s access to formal credit and identifies the socioeconomic characteristics that determine formal credit discrimination. The study used secondary data from the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) published in 2013–14, and analysis was undertaken by econometric approaches such as logistic and multiple linear regression models and propensity score matching methods. The results show that among those participants who successfully obtained credit, approximately 85 per cent of women obtained less credit than men; and the amount of credit that women obtained was also less (on average, approximately 1.8 per cent less). Gender, number of years of schooling, marital status, participation in agricultural activities, off‐farm employment, and ownership of agricultural land for a male‐headed household positively influenced discrimination in obtaining credit and the amount of credit obtained. Moreover, the propensity score matching results found that the average increase in the credit obtained by males was 220,000 Vietnamese Dong (VND) and this is mainly due to discrimination in favour of men. The results suggest that policy action is needed to avoid discrimination in credit disbursement on the basis of gender.     

Slack-based directional distance function in the presence of bad outputs: theory and application to Vietnamese banking

In this paper we extend the slack-based directional distance function introduced by Färe and Grosskopf (Eur J Oper Res 200(1):320–322, 2010) to measure efficiency in the presence of bad outputs and illustrate it through an application on data of Vietnamese commercial banks. We also compare results from the slack-based directional distance function relative to the directional distance function, the enhanced hyperbolic efficiency measure (Färe et al. in Rev Econ Stat 71(1):90–98, 1989) and the Farrell-type technical efficiency and confirm that it has greater discriminative power.     

Financial structure in the age of globalization

Using a large panel data set covering 160 countries over the period 1990 to 2010, this article aims to address the question of how financial structure (bank-based versus market-based system) changes when economies are liberalized and opened to international capital markets. Specifically, in this study, globalization is characterized not only by trade and financial integration but also by other important aspects, such as social globalization, political globalization and cultural globalization. The empirical results support the impacts of globalization on financial structure, which are, however, diverse and strongly depend on the way to measure globalization and financial structure. Our finding also reveals a significant change in financial structure after the globalization process, except the case of low-income countries, in which financial structure seems to be not correlated with either globalization process or other macroeconomic variables.     

The effects of multilateral trading systems on risk and return in equity markets

The event study methodology of Brown and Warner (1985) is adopted and augmented to evaluate the effect of the launch of multilateral trading systems on risk and return in equity markets. The methodology is supplemented with various techniques, such as the nonparametric ranking test and kernel regression, to find out if announcements about the introduction of Chi-X Australia generated abnormal returns (ARs). Asset pricing models are fitted with interaction variables, while GARCH, threshold ARCH (TARCH), exponential GARCH (EGARCH) and power-ARCH (PARCH) are used to determine changes in systematic risk. We find evidence in favour of Fisher’s separation theorem and detect a new market anomaly, which we call the ‘Fisher market anomaly’. Our results show that Chi-X system testings affect ARs. Consistent with the adaptive expectations theory, we confirm that the first announcement about the launch of Chi-X affected systematic risk the most. In addition, we identify industry and firm effects in risk analysis.     

Cattle as a consistently resilient agricultural commodity

This study compares a range of agricultural commodities over periods of varying economic circumstances. These commodities are examined over three categories, including returns, risk, and contribution to portfolio optimisation. Consistency in these categories is determined over four equal three-year stages which comprise pre-GFC (Global Financial Crisis), GFC, post-GFC and post-post GFC. To demonstrate resilience in the most extreme circumstances, the study uses Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR), which measures extreme risk in the tail of a distribution, as the risk measure and risk-return optimiser. The study thus provides a unique and comprehensive extreme-risk based focus which identifies and ranks the consistency of performance of agricultural commodities over a range of criteria and conditions. Cattle commodities consistently demonstrate the strongest overall performance in the categories examined.     

Characterisation and Diagnosis of Rural—Urban Interface Farming in the Tu Liem and Thanh Tri Districts of Hanoi City,Vietnam

A research project was carried out in two areas in the outskirts of Hanoi city using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The objective was to study interactions among the vegetable farming systems and the peri-urban context within which they are situated. The farms studied were characterised as small-scale farms that use high inputs of soil amendments and pesticides for diversified crop rotation systems. The main source of irrigation water and nutrients for vegetable farming in southern Hanoi is wastewater from the To Lich River. In northern Hanoi, irrigation water is obtained directly from the Red River and nutrients are supplied through high fertiliser inputs. The concentrations of COD (144–287 mg l^?1), N-NH₄ ⁺ (1–25 mg l^?1), PO₄ ^3? (0.5–4 mg l^?1) and coliform (525 × 10³?28 × 10⁶ MPN 100 ml^?1) along the To Lich River was much higher than the limits specified in the Vietnamese standard for water used in agriculture. A higher Cu content in soil in Phuc Ly seems to be linked to the high input of chicken manure at the site. However, the contents of heavy metals in irrigation water, in vegetables and in the soil surface layer at the two sites were lower than the Vietnamese maximum permissible levels.