Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies

In this paper, we examine the effects of subprime crisis on the largest African stock markets (South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, and Morocco) by testing the fractal market hypothesis. We use a rolling window Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis, and find decline in local Hurst exponent and an increase in short-term trading activity for all considered stock markets during the global financial crisis. We furthermore investigate the interrelationships of African and the American stock markets using multi-scale contagion test. Findings suggest that the cross-correlation of African stock markets increases with American markets becoming higher during the crisis sub-period. However, the presence of contagion or interdependence effects are country and time horizon-dependent. Implications of the results are discussed.

We examine the effects of signed industry-average earnings management on the pricing of initial public offerings (IPOs). We posit that the variation in an IPOs earnings management is related to industry-average earnings management and, therefore, provides useful information regarding the IPO valuation. We find that higher industry-average earnings management negatively affects the pre-issuance price update and the initial return of IPOs. Our findings lend support to the partial adjustment phenomenon of IPO pricing which suggests information that influences valuation is partially incorporated in the initial offer price and more fully incorporated in the share price during the first-day of secondary market trading.

This paper examines (1) whether auditor type affects initial public offering (IPO) pricing; (2) whether the effect of IPO pricing is different for clients with different ownership structures. We find that (1) firms being audited by Big 4 accounting firms receive IPO premium while others being audited by local accounting firms do not; (2) Big 4 auditors receive higher audit fees than China’s Top 10 or small local auditors. This paper extends the prior research (e.g., Kumar, P and N Langberg (2009). Corporate fraud and investment distortions in efficient capital markets. The RAND Journal of Economics, 40, 144–172) that reduces agency conflicts between shareholders and manager (by means of better audit quality) and also reconciles corporate misreporting and investment distortions.

This paper proposes a method that uses volatility index of US and six other markets of Pacific Basin, namely Hong Kong, Australia, India, Japan, Korea, and China, to provide value-at-risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES) forecasts. Empirical constants that are used to multiply the levels of volatility indexes for estimating VaR and ES of various significance levels for 1–22 days ahead, one by one, for seven market indexes have been statistically determined using daily data spanning from 4.75 to 16 years. It is because it would be inappropriate to simply scale up the one-day volatility by multiplying the square root of time (or the number of days) ahead to determine the risk over a longer horizon of $i$ days. Results show that the shift to ES approach generally increases the regulatory capital requirements from 2.09% of India market to 8.56% of Korea market except for the China market where ES approach yields an unexpected decrease of 3.21% of capital requirement.

Credit risk has severe impacts on banks’ performance, leading to financial and economic distress. To highlight this interesting issue, this study explores bank-specific and macroeconomic determinants of banks’ credit risk, denoted by the level of nonperforming loans (NPLs). The study includes 98 banks from 10 Middle East and North African (MENA) emerging countries spanning the period between 2003 and 2016. The analysis employs panel data estimation technique. Our results reveal that bank size, capital adequacy ratio, bank operating efficiency, profitability, GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, and public debt represent the main determinants of NPLs in MENA emerging markets. The results of this research have practical implications for bank managers, regulators, investors, and financial analysts. This study provides significant insights on the determinants of NPLs, which will allow bank managers to design credit policies that minimize borrowers’ defaults. The findings of the study are useful to policy makers to establish new and reinforce existing regulations to maintain the steadiness of the banking sector in MENA emerging countries.

The study examines the behavioral reactions of foreign and domestic institutional investors in the Indian stock market. It poses some critical questions on whether these two types of institutional investors have common investing behavior, and whether foreign institutional investors (FIIs) affect domestic institutional investors’ (DIIs) strategies. Vector error correction model (VECM) is used to examine the trading and investing behavior of these institutional investors. Granger causality test is used to check if foreign institutional investment strategy influences domestic institutional strategy or vice versa. The results indicate that neither foreign institutional investors’ sell (FIISELL) activities affect domestic institutional investors’ sell (DIISELL) activities nor DIISELL affects FIISELL. This may have a crucial policy implication that both institutional investors have independent trading strategies, especially when it comes to selling stocks. But both institutional investors’ sale transactions do affect their own buy transactions implying that any of the institutions’ selling activities should be supported by their buying activities.

A hedging approach is used to examine the effectiveness of international diversification within the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) region. By using data covering the six GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE) and various sectors, we find that diversification across whole markets is more effective than diversification across sectors, irrespective of whether the constructed portfolios contain two or more assets. The results also reveal that diversification among several markets or sectors is more effective than diversification among two markets or sectors.