Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

This paper investigates the application of option pricing to calculate the premium of deposit insurance in Thailand during the 1992-1996 period. In addition to applying the traditional Black- Scholes model, the barrier model of Boyle and Lee (1994) is examined. The barrier model takes the management (owners) action into account: the management (owners) may have a strong incentive to increase the volatility of the bank's assets, since this action increases the value of their equity. As suggested by the stylized evidence, most financial institutions in Thailand were "family owned", and there was inadequate corporate governance to prevent the incentive problems. The barrier model seems to fit the description of financial institutions in Thailand. The overall results show that the deposit insurance premiums of failed financial institutions are higher than the premiums of non-failed institutions. The evidence suggests that the option framework seems to be appropriate for pricing the premium: higher risk institutions pay higher insurance premiums. The results also show that the risk-based insurance premiums vary across time and on average are less than the premiums charged by the Financial Institutions Development Fund (FIDF).

The experiences of Taiwan and Thailand following the 1997 crisis of the baht provide evidence of the importance of the quality of the financial infrastructure of a country in its ability to deal with unstable financial markets. The very high quality of the financial infrastructure in Taiwan (together with its peripheral role in the crisis itself) enabled its economy to escape relatively unscathed. In contrast, a lack of sophisticated financial institutions and nonfinancial firms both triggered the crisis in Thailand and required the Thai economy to experience its full force.

This study is an attempt to examine whether the deviations of purchasing power parity and uncover interest rate parity Granger-cause the 1997 Asian financial crisis by using vector autoregression and Granger causality tests. The results show that the purchasing power parity and uncover interest rate parity do not hold for most Asian markets. We find weak evidence to support that the deviations of purchasing power parity and uncover interest rate parity have the power to explicate the origin of the financial crisis.

Most Korean IPOs show significant initial underpricing which accounts for high initial returns. Our study explores the institutional and regulatory factors that have affected both the offering and after-market pricing mechanisms to test several hypotheses that might explain this underpricing in the Korean IPO market. We find a systematic difference in the initial stock price performance of new issues in an environment where firms have different motives for going public. We also find that in less regulated periods, the explanatory power of the variables relating to both the signaling and ex ante uncertainty hypotheses increase.

By utilizing vector error correction model (VECM) and EGARCH model, this article uses 5-minute intraday data to examine the interaction of return and volatility between Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index (TAIEX) and the newly introduced TAIEX futures. VECM model shows that there exists bi-directional Granger causality between index spot and index futures markets, but spot market plays a more important role in price discovery. The results of impulse response function and information share indicate that most of the price discovery happens in index spot market. The evidence of EGRACH shows that the impacts of spot and futures innovations are asymmetrical, and the volatility spillovers between spot and futures markets are bi-directional. However, the information flow from spot to futures is stronger. These results suggest that the TAIEX spot market dominates the TAIEX futures market in terms of return and volatility.

This article uses daily data from July 21, 1998 to July 31, 2000 to examine the hedging effectiveness, price behavior, and lead-lag relationship of SGX MSCI Taiwan index futures and TAIFEX TAIEX futures. By applying the Bayesian approach using Gibbs sampler, we find that TAIFEX index futures has a better hedging performance. A variance ratio test reveals that mean reversion and negative correlation of returns exist in SGX index futures. Only TAIFEX TAIEX futures is cointegrated with TAIEX spot. The uni-directional Granger causality between the two futures markets and spot market are from SGX to TAIEX and from TAIEX to TAIFEX. In terms of price discovery, SGX MSCI Taiwan index futures play a more important role than TAIFEX TAIEX futures.