The Stock Price-Volume Linkage on the Toronto Stock Exchange: Before and After Automation

This paper investigates the information content of trading volume on the Toronto Stock Exchange before and after the move towards fully electronic trading. It is argued that if price discovery improves under electronic trading, the predictive power of volume should be less significant. The empirical analysis supports more accurate price discovery under electronic trading. Results from both the structural and vector autoregression models indicate that the predictive power of volume for price variability disappears after full automation.     

Understanding the Welfare Implications of Preferential Trade Agreements

This paper examines various implications of preferential trade agreements, namely customs unions and free trade areas, in the context of a multicountry general equilibrium model. The model is calibrated to represent countries with symmetric endowments, and aggregate and disaggregate welfare change measures are used to quantify the welfare effects of preferential trade agreements. It is found that free trade areas are better than customs unions on welfare grounds for the world as a whole. Welfare decompositions suggest that a significant fraction of the welfare changes is explained by the volume-of-trade effect for both types of preferential trade agreements.     

The Time Varying Relation Between Consumer Confidence and Equities

We examine the impact of changes in consumer confidence measures on future stock index returns. Our analysis is built on the growing understanding that investor sentiment is an important factor in the stock market. By using frequency dependent regression methods, we show that there is a time-varying relation between consumer confidence and stock returns. Higher levels of consumer confidence imply greater returns in the short term but negative returns in the medium term. However, this effect is only observed for the small firm index. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that consumer confidence is significantly affected by stock returns in reverse causality.     

Statistics by Gender: Measures to Reduce Gender Bias in Agricultural Surveys

Statistics by gender has been the concern of policy makers in the recent past years. The demand on data disaggregated by gender has led the survey statistician to collect data and tabulate statistics by gender. In this paper, some measures will be suggested to avoid and reduce gender bias for data collection and tabulation in agricultural surveys.     

Hedonic price estimation for the Turkish bread wheat characteristics

This research has been made to assess the effects of the characteristics of bread wheat quality on the prices in the Turkish bread wheat market. A hedonic price model was used to analyze factors affecting the variability in bread wheat prices. Results indicate that prices received by bread wheat producers reflect the presence of basic quality characteristics of bread wheat. According to the research consequences, the hectoliter and sedimentation are the major factors that have the greatest effect and influence on Turkish bread wheat market in respect to the quality aspects. The study shows that the five regions in Turkey, which have been chosen as the research area and are important in bread wheat production, have differences in terms of bread wheat quality characteristics.     

Commodity prices and inflation: Testing in the frequency domain

We provide evidence for a long term, positive relation between commodity prices and inflation. However, this is only detected when frequency dependency in the regression is statistically accounted for, suggesting nonlinear dynamics between the variables. We also test whether commodity prices can be used to forecast inflation. Again relying on frequency domain methods, we indeed find support for long term causality from commodities to inflation. Moreover, the information content of commodity futures prices is robust to the effects of several financial and economic variables.     

The Attitude of Developed and Developing Countries Towards the Kyoto Protocol and the Case of Turkey

The problem of global climate change is one of the biggest present-day global problems. This problem, which has become a current issue because of the energy crisis that happened in 1970s, as well as growing awareness of environment, have not only changed the notion of development but also led to a transformation of non-renewable energy resources. Due to rapid population growth, the depletion of the non-renewable energy resources and the raising consciousness about global climate change our comprehension of traditional development has yielded to sustainable development, while energy structure and preferences have also changed from non-renewable energy resources to renewable energy resources. As this changed pattern and problem are global, they have removed the borders among governments, required international cooperation and thus, new international actors have stepped in. In this study, the countries are divided into two parts as developed countries and developing countries. As developed countries; USA and EU countries are selected while China and India are selected as developing countries. Also as a developing country, Turkey＇s energy and climate policies, attitude towards the Kyoto Protocol signed within the scope of United Nations and the positive and the negative effects of the Protocol on the country are investigated. In this sense, it has been observed that the question of whether or not the Protocol contributes to the economy of developing countries correlates with whether or not these countries are on the side of the Protocol and it has also been observed that being on the side of the Protocol is not a threat to Turkey＇s development. If applied correctly, the policies that Turkey will pursue within the scope of the Protocol will help the country to reduce foreign energy dependency and cooperate with other countries. A comparative method is used in this paper.     

Consistency of option prices under bid–ask spreads

Given a finite set of European call option prices on a single underlying, we want to know when there is a market model that is consistent with these prices. In contrast to previous studies, we allow models where the underlying trades at a bid–ask spread. The main question then is how large (in terms of a deterministic bound) this spread must be to explain the given prices. We fully solve this problem in the case of a single maturity, and give several partial results for multiple maturities. For the latter, our main mathematical tool is a recent result on approximation by peacocks.     

Information asymmetry, speculation and foreign trading activity: Emerging market evidence

This paper provides evidence on the relation between private-information-based trading and foreign trading activity on the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE). We use a recently developed model that utilizes information in volume-return dynamics of individual stocks and show that variables such as size and Tobin's Q explain the extent of speculative activity across firms traded on the ISE. We present evidence supporting the notion that foreign trading activity is associated with informed trading on the ISE. Implications of our findings for emerging markets research are also discussed.