financial markets and growth the last five years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the relationship between financial intermediation and economic growth this issue had been extensively studied nearly two decades earlier by goldsmith 1969 mckinnon 1973 shaw 1973 and others who produced considerable evidence that financial development correlates with growth but their work though insightful lacked analytical foundations in traditional growth theory financial intermediation could be related to the level of the capital stock per worker or to the level of productivity but not to their respective growth rates the latter were ascribed to exogenous technical progress the recent revival of interest in the link between financial development and growth stems mainly from the insights and techniques of endogenous growth models which have shown that there can be self sustaining growth without exogenous technical progress and that the growth rate can be related to preferences technology income distribution and institutional arrangements this provides the theoretical underpinning that early contributors lacked tinancial intermediation can be shown to have not only level effects but also growth effects the resulting models have offered important insights into the effect of financial development on growth and vice versa they have also provided new impetus to empirical research on these issues this paper reviews the ground covered so far on the theoretical and empirical front and points to some still unresolved issues

disagreement in bargaining an empirical analysis of opec abstract we consider a stylised model in which two cartel members bargain over the aggregate production quota in a world of asymmetric information we show that when the two cartel members are sufficiently different the probability of agreement depends on both the current state of demand and initial production specifically the probability of agreement is much lower when demand is low and initial production is relatively high than when demand is high and initial production is relatively low we also find that regardless of the current demand state the more extreme is initial production the higher is the probability of agreement using an event study where we take as events opec production quota announcements we demonstrate empirically that the predictions of the model are borne out

detecting multiple breaks in financial market volatility dynamics the paper evaluates the performance of several recently proposed tests for structural breaks in the conditional variance dynamics of asset returns the tests apply to the class of arch and sv type processes as well as data driven volatility estimators using high frequency data in addition to testing for the presence of breaks the statistics identify the number and location of multiple breaks we study the size and power of the new tests for detecting breaks in the conditional variance under various realistic univariate heteroscedastic models change point hypotheses and sampling schemes the paper concludes with an empirical analysis using data from the stock and fx markets for which we find multiple breaks associated with the asian and russian financial crises these events resulted in changes in the dynamics of volatility of asset returns in the samples prior and post the breaks copyright 2002 john wiley sons ltd

modelling the relationship between future energy intraday volatility and trading volume with wavelet abstractalthough the energy and stock markets are both characterized by volatility and liquidity and there has been substantial research to explore the relationship between volatility and trading volume tv in stock markets few researchers have investigated this relationship in energy markets moreover studies that have explored this association within energy markets did not describe its nature or impetus to redress this oversight we investigate this relationship using intraday data from the oil and gas markets the most liquid energy markets in the world in this way the current article extends the previous studies through the use of a frequency approach to propose an original analysis of the relationship between volume and volatility more specifically we employ a continuous wavelet transform to identify the lead lag phase between volatility and volume this framework supplants usual time series modelling as it uses a measure of coherence for different frequencies and time scales to capture fu

international evidence on crude oil price dynamics applications of arima garch models abstract we examine the usefulness of several arima garch models for modeling and forecasting the conditional mean and volatility of weekly crude oil spot prices in eleven international markets over the 1 2 1997 10 3 2009 period in particular we investigate the out of sample forecasting performance of four volatility models garch egarch and aparch and figarch over january 2009 to october 2009 forecasting results are somewhat mixed but in most cases the aparch model outperforms the others also conditional standard deviation captures the volatility in oil returns better than the traditional conditional variance finally shocks to conditional volatility dissipate at an exponential rate which is consistent with the covariance stationary garch models than the slow hyperbolic rate implied by the figarch alternative

non stationarities in financial time series the long range dependence and the igarch effects we give the theoretical basis of a possible explanation for two stylized facts observed in long log return series the long range dependence lrd in volatility and the integrated garch igarch both these effects can be explained theoretically if one assumes that the data are nonstationary

outliers and garch models in financial data abstract we propose to extend the additive outlier ao identification procedure developed by franses and ghijsels franses p h ghijsels h 1999 additive outliers garch and forecasting volatility international journal of forecasting 15 1 9 to take into account the innovative outliers ios in a garch model we apply it to three daily stock market indexes and examine the effects of outliers on the diagnostics of normality

structural change and estimated persistence in the garch 1 1 model abstract the estimated persistence parameter in the garch 1 1 model is biased upwards when the parameters of the model are not constant throughout the sample the present paper explains the mechanics of this behavior for a particular class of estimates

modelling oil price volatility with structural breaks in this paper we provide two main innovations i we analyze oil prices of two prominent markets namely west texas intermediate wti and brent using the two recently developed tests by narayan and popp 2010 and liu and narayan 2010 both of which allow for two structural breaks in the data series and ii the latter method is modified to include both symmetric and asymmetric volatility models we identify two structural breaks that occur in 1990 and 2008 which coincidentally correspond to the iraqi kuwait conflict and the global financial crisis respectively we find evidence of persistence and leverage effects in the oil price volatility while further extensions can be pursued the consideration of asymmetric effects as well as structural breaks should not be jettisoned when modelling oil price volatility

the chinese box the opaque economic borders of the chinese state although the state in china is no longer all encompassing as it had been during the pre 1979 centrally planned period it still reaches into numerous areas of the economy notably through its continuing ownership of state owned enterprises as a result china poses a paradox in that it has incomplete property rights and rule of law which are thought to be essential for growth there are though numerous inefficiencies associated with such a gradual transition which may have maintained a stable growth rate in the past but could hamper future economic development as a key example state owned firms continue to benefit from financial repression in which they received preferable allocations of credit thus china s high savings rate fuels investment which has driven growth but is increasingly inefficient as credit is funnelled to the less productive soes this inefficiency points to the need for legal and institutional reforms which may conflict with the still broad but opaque borders of the chinese state copyright 2011 oxford university press

forecasting volatility of crude oil markets abstract this article investigates the efficacy of a volatility model for three crude oil markets brent dubai and west texas intermediate wti with regard to its ability to forecast and identify volatility stylized facts in particular volatility persistence or long memory in this context we assess persistence in the volatility of the three crude oil prices using conditional volatility models the cgarch and figarch models are better equipped to capture persistence than are the garch and igarch models the cgarch and figarch models also provide superior performance in out of sample volatility forecasts we conclude that the cgarch and figarch models are useful for modeling and forecasting persistence in the volatility of crude oil prices

price dispersion in bitcoin exchanges abstract bitcoin is traded in a number of exchanges and there is a large and time varying price dispersion among them we identify the sources of price dispersion using a standard time varying vector autoregression model with stochastic volatility and we find that shocks to transaction fees and bitcoin price growth explain on average 20 and sometimes more than 60 of the variation of price dispersion

modeling and forecasting the volatility of carbon emission market the role of outliers time varying jumps and oil price risk abstract the objectives of this study are three fold first we aim to assess whether outliers or extreme observations occur in the european union allowance eua data second we examine if time varying jumps are present in the carbon emission market third we use the crude oil volatility index ovx to investigate the effect of oil market uncertainty on the emission price volatility in order to detect the possible outliers in the eua market we employ a standard methodology proposed by ane et al 2008 and identify several outliers in the emission data after spotting and then removing those extreme points we apply the garch jump models to both original and outlier free observations the results of the jump model show that while time varying jumps do exist in the uncorrected data most of the jump parameters however become insignificant in case of outlier free observations next the application of an extended egarch model in which ovx is introduced in the garch specification demonstrates that emission prices are highly sensitive to oil market implied volatility and that the impact of ovx on the eua market appears to be asymmetric additionally the use of forecast encompassing test documents that considering the outlier free data and using the information content of ovx would improve the volatility forecasts for the carbon emission market the results of our research carry important implications for both investors and policymakers

bank size and small and medium sized enterprise sme lending evidence from china using panel data collected in 2005 we evaluate how bank size discretion over credit incentive schemes competition and the institutional environment affect lending to small and medium sized enterprises in china we deal with the endogeneity problem using instrumental variables and a reduced form approach is also applied to allow for weak instruments in estimation we find that total bank asset is an insignificant factor for banks decision on small and medium enterprise sme lending but more local lending authority more competition carefully designed incentive schemes and stronger law enforcement encourage commercial banks to lend to smes

forecasting the conditional volatility of oil spot and futures prices with structural breaks and long memory models this paper extends previous studies by investigating the relevance of structural breaks and long memory in modeling and forecasting the conditional volatility of oil spot and futures prices using a variety of garch type models our results can be summarized as follows first we provide evidence of parameter instability in five out of nine garch based conditional volatility processes for energy prices second long memory is effectively present in all the series considered and a figarch model seems to better fit the data but the degree of volatility persistence diminishes significantly after adjusting for structural breaks finally the out of sample analysis shows that volatility models accommodating instability and long memory characteristics of the data provide the best volatility forecasts for most cases

reform without losers an interpretation of china s dual track approach to transition this paper develops a simple model to analyze the dual track approach to market liberalization as a mechanism for implementing efficient pareto improving economic reform that is reform achieving efficiency without creating losers the approach based on the continued enforcement of the existing plan while simultaneously liberalizing the market can be understood as a method for making implicit lump sum transfers to compensate potential losers of the reform the model highlights the critical roles of enforcement of the plan for achieving pareto improvement and full liberalization of the market track for achieving efficiency we examine how the dual track approach has worked in product and labor market liberalization in china

a nonparametric garch model of crude oil price return volatility the use of parametric garch models to characterise crude oil price volatility is widely observed in the empirical literature in this paper we consider an alternative approach involving nonparametric method to model and forecast oil price return volatility focusing on two crude oil markets brent and west texas intermediate wti we show that the out of sample volatility forecast of the nonparametric garch model yields superior performance relative to an extensive class of parametric garch models these results are supported by the use of robust loss functions and the hansen s 2005 superior predictive ability test the improvement in forecasting accuracy of oil price return volatility based on the nonparametric garch model suggests that this method offers an attractive and viable alternative to the commonly used parametric garch models

the transition to a market economy pitfalls of partial reform we present a theory of a partial economic reform of a planned economy similar to the one that took place in russia since 1988 and in china earlier in such a reform some markets are liberalized in the sense that producers can sell output to whomever they want including private firms at free prices but at the same time must sell to state firms at state prices we show that such a reform can result in a substantial diversion of subsidized inputs away from state firms and toward private firms even when state firms value these inputs more the result may be a reduction of total output the simple analysis sheds light on many consequences of the soviet reform such as breakdown of coordination of production increased state policing of delivery quotas prohibitions of trading cooperatives and opposition to privatization the model also explains why partial reform failed in russia but worked in china

oil price dynamics 2002 2006 abstract oil price dynamics during 2002 2006 have been characterized by high volatility high intensity jumps and strong upward drift and were concomitant with underlying fundamentals of oil markets and world economy namely pressure on oil prices resulting from rigid crude oil supply and expanding world demand for crude oil a change in the oil price process parameters would require a change in underlying fundamentals market expectations extracted from call and put option prices anticipated no change in underlying fundamentals in the short term markets expected oil prices to remain volatile and jumpy and with higher probabilities to rise rather than fall above the expected mean

modeling and forecasting crude oil markets using arch type models this study investigates the time varying volatility of two major crude oil markets the west texas intermediate wti and europe brent a flexible autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch model is used to take into account the stylized volatility facts such as clustering volatility asymmetric news impact and long memory volatility among others the empirical results indicate that the intensity of long persistence volatility in the wti is greater than in the brent it is also found that for the wti the appreciation and depreciation shocks of the wti have similar impact on the resulting volatility however a leverage effect is found in brent although both the estimation and diagnostic evaluations are in favor of an asymmetric long memory arch model only the wti models provide superior in the out of sample forecasts on the other hand from the empirical out of sample forecasts it appears that the simplest parsimonious generalized arch provides the best forecasted evaluations for the brent crude oil data

estimating oil price value at risk using the historical simulation approach abstract in this paper we propose using value at risk var for oil price risk quantification var provides an estimation for the maximum oil price change associated with a likelihood level and can be used for designing risk management strategies we analyse three var calculation methods the historical simulation standard approach the historical simulation with arma forecasts hsaf approach developed in this paper and the variance covariance method based on autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models forecasts the results obtained indicate that hsaf methodology provides a flexible var quantification which fits the continuous oil price movements well and provides an efficient risk quantification

the inefficiency of bitcoin bitcoin has received much attention in the media and by investors in recent years although there remains scepticism and a lack of understanding of this cryptocurrency we add to the literature on bitcoin by studying the market efficiency of bitcoin through a battery of robust tests evidence reveals that returns are significantly inefficient over our full sample but when we split our sample into two subsample periods we find that some tests indicate that bitcoin is efficient in the latter period therefore we conclude that bitcoin in an inefficient market but may be in the process of moving towards an efficient market

large shocks small shocks and economic fluctuations outliers in macroeconomic time series summary we analyse fifteen post world war i1 us macroeconomic time series using a modified outlier identification procedure based on tsay 1988a large shocks appear to be present in all the series we examined furthermore there are three basic outlier patterns i outliers seem to be associated with business cycles 2 outliers are clustered together both over time and across series 3 there appears to be a dichotomy between outlier behaviour of real versus nominal series also after controlling for outliers much of the evidence of non linearity in many of the time series is eliminated

regime switching stochastic volatility evidence from the crude oil market this paper incorporates regime switching into the stochastic volatility sv framework in an attempt to explain the behavior of crude oil prices in order to forecast their volatility more specifically it models the volatility of oil return as a stochastic volatility process whose mean is subject to shifts in regime the shift is governed by a two state first order markov process the bayesian markov chain monte carlo method is used to estimate the models the main findings are first there is clear evidence of regime switching in the oil market ignoring it will lead to a false impression that the volatility is highly persistent and therefore highly predictable second incorporating regime switching into the sv framework significantly enhances the forecasting power of the sv model third the regime switching stochastic volatility model does a good job in capturing major events affecting the oil market

opec announcements and their effects on crude oil prices we investigate evidence on the effects of opec announcements on world oil prices by examining announcements from both official conferences and ministerial meetings on major international crudes including the key benchmarks and several other heavy and light grades with data from 1982 to 2008 we use event study methodology and find differentiation in the magnitude and significance of market responses to opec quota decisions under different price bands we also find some weak evidence of differentiation between light and heavy crude grades

does the rights hypothesis apply to china abstractusing firm level data from a world bank survey this paper examines how legal development in china relates to various firm decisions i find that a more active court system is associated with more investment more adoption of technology more innovation and more complex transactions specifically when a higher percentage of business disputes are resolved through the court system firms tend to have higher investment rates higher propensities to adopt new automated technology and higher probabilities of developing new products in addition they tend to have more nonlocal sales these findings are consistent with a sophisticated version of the rights hypothesis in which the rule of law eventually replaces relation based governance as a superior governance mechanism i find two limitations of china s legal system the court system does a better job facilitating the growth of state owned enterprises than of private firms and it protects local firms better than nonlocal firms

on the inefficiency of bitcoin abstract urquhart 2016 investigated the market efficiency of bitcoin by means of five different tests on bitcoin returns it was concluded that the bitcoin returns do not satisfy the efficient market hypothesis we show here that a simple power transformation of the bitcoin returns do satisfy the hypothesis through the use of eight different tests the transformation used does not lead to any loss of information

a markov switching model of the conditional volatility of crude oil futures prices abstract this paper examines the temporal behaviour of volatility of daily returns on crude oil futures using a generalised regime switching model that allows for abrupt changes in mean and variance garch dynamics basis driven time varying transition probabilities and conditional leptokurtosis this flexible model enables us to capture many complex features of conditional volatility within a relatively parsimonious set up we show that regime shifts are clearly present in the data and dominate garch effects within the high volatility state a negative basis is more likely to increase regime persistence than a positive basis a finding which is consistent with previous empirical research on the theory of storage e g fama and french 1988a fama and french 1988b and ng and pirrong 1994 the volatility regimes identified by our model correlate well with major events affecting supply and demand for oil out of sample tests indicate that the regime switching model performs noticeably better than non switching models regardless of evaluation criteria we conclude that regime switching models provide a useful framework for the financial historian interested in studying factors behind the evolution of volatility and to oil futures traders interested short term volatility forecasts

measuring financial asset return and volatility spillovers with application to global equity markets we provide a simple and intuitive measure of interdependence of asset returns and or volatilities in particular we formulate and examine precise and separate measures of return spillovers and volatility spillovers our framework facilitates study of both non crisis and crisis episodes including trends and bursts in spillovers and both turn out to be empirically important in particular in an analysis of sixteen global equity markets from the early 1990s to the present we find striking evidence of divergent behavior in the dynamics of return spillovers vs volatility spillovers return spillovers display a gently increasing trend but no bursts whereas volatility spillovers display no trend but clear bursts

forecasting crude oil market volatility further evidence using garch class models abstract this paper extends the work of kang et al 2009 we use a greater number of linear and nonlinear generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch class models to capture the volatility features of two crude oil markets brent and west texas intermediate wti the one five and twenty day out of sample volatility forecasts of the garch class models are evaluated using the superior predictive ability test and with more loss functions unlike kang et al 2009 we find that no model can outperform all of the other models for either the brent or the wti market across different loss functions however in general the nonlinear garch class models which are capable of capturing long memory and or asymmetric volatility exhibit greater forecasting accuracy than the linear ones especially in volatility forecasting over longer time horizons such as five or twenty days

forecasting crude oil market volatility further evidence with jumps this paper analyzes volatility models and their forecasting abilities in the presence of jumps in two crude oil markets brent and west texas intermediate wti between january 6th 1992 and december 31st 2014 we compare a number of garch type models that capture short memory as well as asymmetry garch gjr garch and egarch estimated on raw returns to three competing approaches that deal with the presence of jumps garch type models estimated on jump filtered returns and two new classes of volatility models called generalized autoregressive score gas and markov switching multifractal msm models estimated using raw returns the forecasting performance of these volatility models is evaluated using the model confidence set approach which allows us to identify a subset of models that outperform all the other competing models we find that asymmetric models estimated on filtered returns provide better out of sample forecasts than do garch gas type and msm models estimated on raw return series for brent and wti returns

estimating garch volatility in the presence of outliers garch volatilities depend on the unconditional variance which is a non linear function of the parameters consequently they can have larger biases than estimated parameters using robust methods to estimate both parameters and volatilities is shown to outperform maximum likelihood procedures

opec in the news abstract this paper introduces a newspaper article count index related to opec that rises in response to important opec meetings and events connected with opec production levels i use this index to measure how interest in opec varies over time and investigate how oil price volatility behaves when the index unexpectedly changes i find that unexpected increases in the newspaper index are strongly associated with higher levels of oil price volatility both realized and implied in some cases these unexpected movements appear to be driven by an unpredictable opec event such as the iraq invasion of kuwait in other cases such as the oil price collapses in late 2008 and late 2014 unforeseen developments in the oil market or broader economy seem to generate the unexpected movements in price volatility and interest in opec the newspaper index is highly correlated with google search volume data on opec an alternative measure of the amount of attention paid to opec events

the persistence of volatility and stock market fluctuations this paper examines the potential influence of changing volatility in stock market prices on the level of stock market prices it demonstrates that volatility is only weakly serially correlated implying that shocks to volatility do not persist these shocks can therefore have only a small impact on stockmarket prices since changes in volatility affect expected required rates of return for relatively short intervals these findings lead us to be skeptical of recent claims that the stock market s poor performance during the 1970 s can be explained by volatility induced increases in risk premia this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

long memory interdependency and inefficiency in bitcoin markets abstract we model cross market bitcoin prices as long memory processes and study dynamic interdependence in a fractionally cointegrated var framework we find long memory in both the individual markets and the system of markets depicting non homogeneous informational inefficiency moreover bitcoin markets are found to be fractionally cointegrated where uncertainty negatively impacts this type of cointegration relationship

jumps and stochastic volatility in oil prices time series evidence abstract in this paper we examine the empirical performance of affine jump diffusion models with stochastic volatility in a time series study of crude oil prices we compare four different models and estimate them using the markov chain monte carlo method the support for a stochastic volatility model including jumps in both prices and volatility is strong and the model clearly outperforms the others in terms of a superior fit to data our estimation method allows us to obtain a detailed study of oil prices during two periods of extreme market stress included in our sample the gulf war and the recent financial crisis we also address the economic significance of model choice in two option pricing applications the implied volatilities generated by the different estimated models are compared and we price a real option to develop an oil field our findings indicate that model choice can have a material effect on the option values

volatility persistence in crude oil markets financial market participants and policy makers can benefit from a better understanding of how shocks can affect volatility over time this study assesses the impact of structural changes and outliers on volatility persistence of three crude oil markets brent west texas intermediate wti and organization of petroleum exporting countries opec between january 2 1985 and june 17 2011 we identify outliers using a new semi parametric test based on conditional heteroscedasticity models these large shocks can be associated with particular event patterns such as the invasion of kuwait by iraq the operation desert storm the operation desert fox and the global financial crisis as well as opec announcements on production reduction or us announcements on crude inventories we show that outliers can bias i the estimates of the parameters of the equation governing volatility dynamics ii the regularity and non negativity conditions of garch type models garch igarch figarch and hygarch and iii the detection of structural breaks in volatility and thus the estimation of the persistence of the volatility therefore taking into account the outliers on the volatility modelling process may improve the understanding of volatility in crude oil markets

market risk in commodity markets a var approach we put forward value at risk models relevant for commodity traders who have long and short trading positions in commodity markets in a 5 year out of sample study on aluminium copper nickel brent crude oil and wti crude oil daily cash prices and cocoa nearby futures contracts we assess the performance of the riskmetrics skewed student aparch and skewed student arch models while the skewed student aparch model performs best in all cases the skewed student arch model delivers good results and its estimation does not require non linear optimization procedures as such this new model could be relatively easily integrated in a spreadsheet like environment and used by market practitioners

jumps in financial markets a new nonparametric test and jump dynamics this paper introduces a new nonparametric test to detect jump arrival times and realized jump sizes in asset prices up to the intra day level we demonstrate that the likelihood of misclassiflcation of jumps becomes negligible when we use high frequency returns using our test we examine jump dynamics and their distributions in the u s equity markets the results show that individual stock jumps are associated with prescheduled earnings announcements and other company speciflc news events additionally s p 500 index jumps are associated with general market news announcements this suggests difierent pricing models for individual equity options versus index op

testing for arch in the presence of additive outliers in this paper we investigate the properties of the lagrange multiplier lm test for autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch and generalized arch garch in the presence of additive outliers ao s we show analytically that both the asymptotic size and power are adversely affected if ao s are neglected the test rejects the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity too often when it is in fact true while the test has difficulty detecting genuine garch effects several monte carlo experiments show that these phenomena occur in small samples as well we design and implement a robust test which has better size and power properties than the conventional test in the presence of ao s applications to the french industrial production series and weekly returns of the spanish peseta us dollar exchange rate reveal that sometimes apparent garch effects may be due to only a small number of outliers and conversely that genuine garch effects can be masked by outliers

persistence in variance structural change and the garch model this article examines the persistence of the variance as measured by the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch model in stock return data in particular we investigate the extent to which persistence in variance may be overstated because of the existence of and failure to take account of deterministic structural shifts in the model both an analysis of daily stock return data and a monte carlo simulation experiment confirm the hypothesis that garch measures of persistence in variance are sensitive to this type of model misspecification

which determinant is the most informative in forecasting crude oil market volatility fundamental speculation or uncertainty abstract this paper aims to identify the most informative determinant in forecasting crude oil market volatility we use a new garch class model based on mixed data sampling regression and the dynamic model averaging combination method to examine the predicting power of the determinants we integrate both the global economic policy uncertainty gepu indices and several national economic policy uncertainty epu indices with traditional determinants such as global oil demand supply and speculation our analysis suggests that the epu indices comprehensively integrate the information contained in other determinants specifically gepu indices and the u s s epu index have superior predictive powers for west texas intermediate spot oil volatility this finding highlights the importance of epu indices implying that they are key factors to consider when determining crude oil market volatility

effects of oil price fall on the betas in the unconventional oil gas industry abstract we examine the consequences of the oil prices movements started in july 2014 on the financial systematic risk proxied by betas of firms operating in the unconventional oil gas industry compared to that of the conventional oil gas players the analysis is developed using two cross section regressions performed before and after the 2014 oil price drop respectively the results look coherent with the reasonable belief that a sharp and sudden decrease in the oil price can generally lead to higher betas in the oil gas industry interestingly it emerged that the market tends to attribute an additional risk to unconventional firms and analyzing the regression coefficients evolution it appears that this circumstance has been substantially amplified by the 2014 oil price shock to our knowledge this is the first paper covering the topic treated

a reexamination of the conglomerate merger wave in the 1960s an internal capital markets view one possible explanation for bidding firms earning positive abnormal returns in diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s is that internal capital markets were expected to overcome the information deficiencies of the less developed capital markets examining 392 bidder firms during the 1960s we find the highest bidder returns when financially unconstrained buyers acquire constrained targets this result holds while controlling for merger terms and for different proxies used to classify firms facing costly external financing we also find that bidders generally retain target management suggesting that management may have provided companyspecific operational information while the bidder provided capital budgeting expertise