This study examines whether Korean rating agencies such as Korea Investors Service (KIS), National Information & Credit Evaluation (NICE), and Korea Ratings Corporation (KR), incorporate corporate governance into their corporate bond ratings in Korea. We find that the Korean rating agencies assign higher ratings to the bonds issued by Chaebol (Korean business group) affiliated firms. Our results also indicate that those rating agencies give higher ratings to the bonds with greater foreign investor share ownership. Moreover, if the rating agencies value corporate governance, higher rated firms should issue bonds at lower yield to maturity. We discover that Chaebol affiliation is counted favorably by the rating agencies. We find that investors are willing to pay lower risk premium for bonds with higher institutional ownership, but higher risk premium to bonds with greater equity ownership in the form of depository receipts. Therefore, even if the rating agencies and investors in Korea consider corporate governance (Chaebol affiliation and ownership structure) an important determinant in bond ratings and the yields to maturity, they have opposite views on institutional ownership and share ownership in the form of depository receipts.

This study investigates daily stock market anomalies in Chinese stock market, using nine most representative stock indices over an eleven year time period spanning from pre-financial crisis era to six years into the financial crisis. This research is the first to test the presence of the day of the week effect on stock returns in the Chinese stock exchanges during the financial crisis. We find that the day of week effects have been strongly significant in Chinese stock exchanges since 2004. However, unlike the previously found negative Monday effect and positive Friday effect in the U.S., Chinese stock market shows positive returns on Mondays and negative returns on Tuesdays. More importantly, the negative Tuesday effect is only significant after the inception of financial crisis. The results indicate a positive effect on Mondays and a negative effect on Thursdays. More importantly, we find a negative Tuesday effect during the financial crisis, which suggests a spillover of the Monday effect from the U.S. stock market. Our results shed some light on the degree of market efficiency in the largest emerging capital market in the world, and its increasingly close relationship with the U.S. capital market.

This study uses an endogenous economic growth model to determine the long run relationship between trade openness and economic growth in China by using the data 1975-2009.It contributes to the literature by developing trade openness index. An autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration and rolling regression method are employed. This study tests the link between trade openness and economic growth in the case of China by using the framework of endogenous economic growth model. This study also employs the rolling window regression method in order to examine the stability of coefficients throughout the sample span. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration technique and rolling regression method are used. The empirical findings indicate that trade openness (i.e. Both individual trade indicator and composite trade openness index) are positively related to economic growth in the long run and short run. Our results indicate that trade openness as measured by individual trade indicator and composite trade openness index are positively related to economic growth in the long run and short run. However, results from the rolling window suggest that trade openness is negatively linked to economic growth only for a number of years.

The rapid expansion of China's trade surplus since the mid-eighties and picking up until the onset of 2008-09 global financial crisis has been a key development in the world economy. While growing trade surplus of China has been viewed with cynicism borne out of an undervalued Yuan and for having being a member of WTO since 2001, many others argue that China's trade surplus reflect changes in China's economic and trade structure and associated shifts in its role within regional and global production chains. We address this issue by analyzing: (i) China's growing and changing trade structure as well as changing structure of trade surplus with the rest of the world, USA, Europe, Japan and rest of Asia, (ii) China's revealed comparative advantage (RCA) with the rest of the world, and (iii) how China's trade policies resulted into a shift in China's trade structure. We find that, not only China has made significant inroads in the world trade since its admission to WTO, but also there has been a noticeable shift in China's trade structure with specialization in high-end technology industries wherein China's exports aided by a well calibrated FDI policy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the volatility of both Islamic and conventional stock market in Indonesia with the aim of identifying the most appropriate model for risk management practice. The study considers GARCH as a genre of model to measure the volatility of stock market movement. The results support the view that each model shows specific volatility from both Islamic and conventional stock market in Indonesia. In Islamic stock market, volatility is affected by exchange rate and money supply (M1) but not interest rate as interest is prohibited in Islam. However, interest rate is found as a principal factor that affects volatility of conventional stock market. The outcomes of this paper are of particular significance to policy makers, as it provides guidelines to maintain economic health. Furthermore, the findings may assist practitioners to understand the consequences of macroeconomic factors such as exchange rate, money supply and interest rate, which are very crucial for the market stability of Indonesian stock market. The paper enhances the understanding of stock market volatility and proposes guidelines risk management practices.

Shareholders solely depend on annual reports to make investment, credit and other decisions. Investors expect that information should be reliable, relevant, comparable, consistent and thus easy to use for decision making. But whether the importance of annual reports to all shareholders is equally significant is a question of research. Thus, this research study tries to find out the importance of reading annual reports to the investors. A questionnaire survey is conducted on investors considering thirty one general shareholders and six brokers. This research based survey finds that most of the shareholders have no knowledge about accounting or finance and they have little knowledge about capital markets due to lack of training. This study also finds that general shareholders read an annual report at least moderately except value added statement, chairman's review, director's report and rumor. This study recommends human resource should be developed through adequate training, and annual reports should provide transparent and quality information which will ultimately increase the confidence of investors.

This paper is the first of its kind using a non-linear approach based on cross-correlation function (CCF) to investigate the information arrival hypothesis in crude palm oil (CPO) futures market. Based on daily data from 1986 to 2010, our empirical results reveal that: First, the volume of volatility is not a proxy of information flow. Second, dependence causality running from current return to future volume in conditional variance exhibit an asymmetric pattern of time span with different signs of correlation between price and volume series. This finding indicates the presence of noise traders' hypothesis of price-volume interaction in CPO futures market. Both findings suggest that this futures market is weak-form inefficiency. In terms of investors' behavior, they tend to change their expectations on current return based on errors made in previous trade in generating abnormal volume in the subsequent period. As implied, it is advisable for the investors devise their future trading strategies according to time span and changes of return.

The aim of this study is theoretical and methodological justification of formation of a new policy of spatial development of Kazakhstan's economy, which is based on the principles of inclusiveness and smart specialization. Unlike previous research, the scientific significance of the obtained results consists in the conceptual justification of the basic theoretical concepts; spatial development, covering issues of concentration, specialization, and location of production. In this study, we used scientific methods: conceptual approach involves studying various concepts of spatial development on the principle of inclusive growth and smart specialization; economic analysis allows conducting a brief assessment of the economic status of regions for a certain period; structured approach involves to the formation of new policy of spatial development. Based on this research we conclude that most successful regions have formed based on principles of inclusiveness and smart specialization, which increases opportunities for well-functioning synergistic mechanism in the field of advanced technologies with subsequent access to global markets.