Review of Development Finance最新文献

A key feature of financial services liberalization is the increasing presence of foreign banks in a nation. This study examines the impact of banking sector globalization on bank profits and cost efficiency by using a panel of 169 nations spanning 1998–2013. Employing both fixed-effects and GMM estimations, and including banking-industry and macroeconomic controls, I find greater banking-sector globalization to reduce both profits and cost inefficiency, thereby reflecting increased competitiveness and informational asymmetries in host markets, as well as assimilation of better technology, managerial practices by domestic banks. The results are further examined for nations across different levels of economic development and with different degrees of foreign bank presence. Only in emerging markets and in nations with more than 50% foreign banks, greater banking sector globalization positively affects profits. From a policy perspective, the findings call for banking regulatory authorities to implement polices to reduce informational asymmetries in host markets.

This paper explores whether business group affiliations affect the covariance structure of stock returns in Korea. We find that the stock returns of firms belonging to the same business group show positive and significant comovement. The strong comovement between group returns and firm returns is explained by correlated fundamentals. We find strong comovement among business group affiliate earnings. Moreover, variance decomposition of returns shows that cash flow news plays a relatively more important role in explaining group comovement than discount rate news, suggesting a link between stock return comovement and the “tunneling” and “propping” behaviors of business groups. Finally, return comovement increases when a firm joins a business group.

Using data for 1238 banks located in 94 developing and emerging countries, we explore whether the impact of bank regulation and supervision on banking risk (measured by the banks’ Z-scores) depends on bank structure. Our findings suggest that stricter regulation and supervision increases the banks’ Z-scores. Notably capital requirements and supervisory control diminish banking risk. However, the effectiveness of other dimensions of regulation and supervision depends on the organizational structure of banks. Notably activity restrictions reduce risk of large and foreign owned banks, while liquidity restrictions have most effect on the Z-scores of unlisted and commercial banks.

This paper models time-varying volatility in one of the Indian main stock markets, namely, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) located in Mumbai, investigating whether it has been affected by the recent global financial crisis. A Chow test indicates the presence of a structural break. Both symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models suggest that the volatility of NSE returns is persistent and asymmetric and has increased as a result of the crisis. The model under the Generalized Error Distribution appears to be the most suitable one. However, its out-of-sample forecasting performance is relatively poor.

Stock returns in emerging market economies exhibit patterns that are distinctively different from developed countries: returns are noted to be highly volatile and autocorrelated, and long horizon returns are predictable. While these stylized facts are well established, the assumption underlying the distribution of returns is less understood. In particular, the empirical literature continues to rely on the normality assumption as a starting point, and most asset pricing models tend to overstretch this point. This paper questions the rationale behind this supposition and proceeds to test more formally for normality using multivariate joint test for skewness and kurtosis. Additionally, the paper extends the literature by examining a number of empirical regularities for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the BRICS for short). Our main findings are that the distribution of stock returns for the BRICS exhibits peakedness with fatter and longer tails, and this is invariant to both the unit of measurement and the time horizon of returns. Volatility clustering is prevalent in all markets, and this decays exponentially for all but Brazil. The relationship between risk and return is found to be significant and risk premiums are prevalent in our sample.

Debt relief provides low-income countries with an incentive to accumulate debt, boost consumption, and reduce investment over time. We quantify this incentive effect employing a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, calibrated to 1982–2006 Ugandan data, and find that long-run debt and consumption-to-GDP ratios are about twice as high with debt relief than without it, while the investment-to-GDP ratio is sixty percent lower. Our simulations show that debt-relief episodes are likely to have only a temporary impact on debt levels but may have a lasting effect over the size of the economy, lowering GDP growth up to twenty percent over time. These results fill a gap in the debt relief literature since, to the best of our knowledge, the quantification of incentive effects is rather scarce. The paper further contributes to the literature by constructing a tractable structural model that is able to replicate the data well and captures key features of low-income countries facing the possibility of debt relief.

This paper applies models in the extant literature that have been used to forecast operating cash flows to predict the cash flows of South African firms listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Out-of-sample performance is examined for each model and compared between them. The reported results show that some accrual terms, i.e. depreciation and changes in inventory do not enhance cash flow prediction for the average South African firm in contrast to the reported results of studies in USA and Australia. Inclusion of more explanatory variables does not necessarily improve the models, according to the out-of-sample results. The paper proposes the application of moving average model in panel data, and vector regressive model for multi-period-ahead prediction of cash flows for South Africa firms.

The presence of rationing of financial services in the developing countries is a major obstacle to achieving sustainable growth. In recent years there have been co-ordinated efforts to increase the level of financial inclusion, i.e. to reduce the supply-side constraints restricting access to finance. This paper aims to understand household's latent behaviour decision making in accessing financial services, by analysing an entry level Mzansi account in South Africa. The willingness to access financial services is not taken as given, but it is instead defined by perceptions and attitudes. The Mzansi intervention is appealing to individuals with basic but insufficient financial education. Aspirations seem to be very influential in revealing the choice of financial services and to this end, Mzansi is perceived as a pre-entry account not meeting the aspirations of individuals aiming to climb up the financial services ladder.

The paper employs both fractional integration and structural break techniques in studying the daily share prices structure of the banking sector in Nigeria. Our data span between 2001 and 2012, covers periods before and after the global financial crisis. The results obtained using both parametric and semiparametric methods indicate little evidence of mean reversion since most of the orders of integration are equal to or higher than 1. Long memory is found in the absolute and squared return series. The possibility of structural breaks is also taken into account and the results show a different number of breaks depending on the bank examined. In general, an increase in the degree of dependence across time is noticed, and the most common break took place in December 2008, probably being related with the world financial crisis affecting also the banking system in Nigeria.

In this paper, we test whether the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) is a common currency area by using a structural vector autoregressive model to study the variance decomposition, impulse responses of key economic variables and linear dependence of the underlying structural shocks of the countries in the zone. The variance decomposition shows that the zone as a whole does not have common sources of shock, which is expected because of the diverse economic structures of these countries. The correlation of the structural shocks also shows that these countries respond asymmetrically to common supply, demand and monetary shocks and will therefore respond differently to a common monetary policy. It is therefore not in the interest of the individual countries to go into a monetary union now or in the near future unless the economies of these countries converge further.