Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall, and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. This paper assesses the magnitude of the impact of housing...

The extent to which the stock market provides a hedge to investors against inflation is examined for African stock markets. By employing parametric and nonparametric cointegration procedures, we show that the point estimates of the elasticities of stock prices with respect to consumer prices...

We employ parametric and non-parametric cointegration to investigate the extent of integration between African stock markets and the rest of the world. Long-run correlation estimates imply very low association between the two. The two distinct cointegration approaches confirm the latter through...

This paper analyzes detailed differences in patterns of financial development across the major Asian economies, including three of the region's largest economies (China, Japan and South Korea), to understand how these differences might affect possibilities for greater regional financial...

Liquidity backstops have important implications for financial stability. In this paper, we provide a microfoundation for the important role of liquidity backstops in mitigating runs (or, conversely, the role of the lack of liquidity backstops in exacerbating runs) based on a dynamic model of...

We find that the location of corporate headquarters significantly affects the firm’s bondholders. Similar to Loughran and Schultz (2006) and others, who show that investors are better able to obtain information on nearby companies, we look at firms located in large metropolitan cities, small...

Liquidity, the ease of trading an asset, strongly varies between different sizes of stock positions. We analyze this aspect using the Xetra Liquidity Measure (XLM), which calculates daily, weighted spread for impatient traders transacting against the limit order book. For this measure, we have...

Heterosedasticity in returns may be explainable by trading volume. We use different volume variables, including surprise volume - i.e. unexpected above-avergae trading activity - which is derived from uncorrelated volume innovations. Assuming eakly exogenous volume, we extend the Lamoureux and...

This paper describes a mechanism designed to induce commercial banks to increase their willingness to extend loans in an economic environment characterized by increased uncertainty and diminished expectations. This mechanism is a new tool for the conduct of monetary policy to combat recessions.