We study the evolution of global equity market integration using US dollar denominated iShares. Designed to mimic the movements of MSCI indices, these securities provide an easy pool of international diversification products for the investor. As such they allow us to conduct an analysis of the largest equity markets comovements devoid of problems associated with trading restrictions, exchange r...

Extreme asset price movements appear to be more pronounced over time and have major consequences for an economy’s financial stability and monetary policies. This paper investigates the extreme behaviour of equity market returns and quantifies the probabilities of these losses. Taking fourteen major equity markets the study illustrates similarities and divergences in the tail returns from around...

Extreme asset price movements appear to be more pronounced recently and have major consequences for an economy’s financial stability and monetary policies. This paper investigates the extreme behaviour of equity market returns and quantifies the probabilities of these losses. Taking fourteen major equity markets the study is able to ascertain similarities and divergences in the tail returns fro...

BACKGROUND Inequities in both health status and coverage of health services are considered important barriers to achieving Millennium Development Goal 4. Community-based health promotion is a strategy that is believed to reduce inequities in rural low-income settings. This paper examines the contributions of community-based programming to improving the equity of newborn health in three district...

This study investigates the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) equity indices with conventional in Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) individually across all BRICS countries to better understand regional economic cooperation. Accordingly, we look at daily returns from 13 July 2013 28 February 2018 for Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) ESG MSCI c...

The Indices of Social Development combine over 200 variables from 25 sources, providing the most comprehensive database showing the variation of social institutions – understood as the informal norms and behaviors that pattern social interaction – across countries and over time. Based on these sources, progress on five areas, civic activism, clubs and associations, interpersonal safety and trus...

The extraordinary conditions in the financial world of late 2008 caused severe market dislocations and consequently many asset managers experienced significant portfolio losses, partly due to ineffective hedging techniques. In order to examine the effect of the credit crisis on investment strategies, we create a diverse set of long-short equity portfolios with domestic equity sectors and an arr...

Variations in aggregate poverty indices ca be due to differences in average poverty intensity, to changes in the welfare distances between those poor of initially unequal welfare status, and/or to emerging disparities in welfare among those poor of initially similar welfare status. This note uses a general cost-of-inequality approach that decomposes the total change in poverty into a sum of ind...

Recent advances in dynamic factor modelling allow for automated construction of diffusion indices based on large numbers of explanatory variables. We use the methodology proposed by Stock and Watson (1998) to test if such diffusion indices can be used for asset market applications where predictability is expected to be small or nonexistent. Results show that for portfolios formed using the larg...

BACKGROUND High-technology medical equipment (HTME) are important health resources. However, there is unequal distribution of these equipment in favor of metropolis and well equipped health facilities. This study sought to examine the equity gaps in the distribution of HTME in Guangxi. The results of this study could shed light on the future HTME allocation in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. ...