We look at two countries that have independent fundamentals, but share the same group of investors. Each country might face a self-fulfilling crisis: Agents withdrawing their investments fearing that others will. A crisis in one country reduces agents’ wealth. This makes them more averse to the strategic risk associated with the unknown behavior of other agents in the second country, increasing...

Using data from publicly traded South Korean corporations for the period 1980-94, this paper finds evidence that increases in financial liberalization that accompanied the more general process of financial globalization have significantly reduced the maturity structure of corporate debt contracts, thus lending partial empirical support to the idea that financial liberalization can be well descr...

This paper examines the level of integration of European stock markets. We estimate a conditional asset pricing model, which allows for a time-varying degree of integration that measures the importance of EU-wide risk relative to country-speci c risk. The model accounts for intra-European currency risk, time-varying quantities and prices of risk. The results indicate that the degree of integrat...

What motivates investors to hold American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) rather than the underlying stock of U.S. listed foreign firms? We analyze the investment allocation decision of actively-managed emerging market mutual fund managers. Although legal provisions are typically assumed to affect ADR and its underlying domestic shares equally, investors holding ADRs may have a higher level of legal...

This paper establishes the link of microstructure and macroeconomic factors with the timevarying conditional correlation of foreign exchange and excess equity returns. By using the proposed DCC model with exogenous variables, capital flows and interest rate differentials are shown to be significant determinants of this correlation which is inclusive of the short-run variation of both asset retu...

This paper provides preliminary evidence that interest groups reduce both the level and the volatility of returns on a national stock market. These findings are robust to model specifications that include traditional growth regression “policy” variables as well as political, economic, and financial institutions variables. The estimated magnitude of the relationship between interest group activi...

We study portfolio allocation and characterize contracts issued by firms in the international financial market when investors exhibit ambiguity aversion and perceive ambiguity in assets issued in foreign locations. Increases in the variance of their risky production process cause firms to issue assets with a higher variable payment (equity). Hikes in investors’ perceived ambiguity have the oppo...

This paper examines the issues of excess volatility and excess comovement of interest rates among global bond markets. The base model of interest rate behavior is the expectations theory of the term structure. The empirical evidence presented in the paper indicates that 10-year government bond yields in five major markets—the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada—have in ...

This paper applies an established bid-ask spread decomposition model to spot foreign exchange market in order to assess the impact of European Monetary Union (EMU). Additionally, the paper presents and tests a modified decomposition model which is specifically adapted to the features of order-driven markets. The latter model provides much improved performance. Price clustering is introduced as ...

This paper quantifies the impact of changes in U.S. monetary policy on sovereign bond spreads in emerging market countries. Specifically, the paper explores empirically how country risk, as proxied by sovereign bond spreads, is influenced by U.S. monetary policy, country-specific fundamentals, and conditions in global capital markets. While country-specific fundamentals are important in explain...