Suchergebnisse

The issue of the location of Foreign Direct Investment is receiving a renewed interest in the literature since developing countries have now started to compete for the attraction of foreign capital. In particular, the European Union is at the centre of a region where strong integration dynamics are in place, and where the 'peripheries' i.e. Central and Eastern Europe and the South Mediterranean shore, are taking advantage of an increasing presence of European multinationals. The full implications of such dynamics, for both the European Union and the bordering countries, are yet to be fully understood given the complex issues behind the detfirminants of FDI location. At this purpose, we will exploit two unique databases, constructing a panel probit model of FDI detfirminants of more than 3,500 European multinationals having invested in Central and Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean over the 1990-1997 period in 48 NACE-3 different industries. We will then discuss the policy implications for the European Union and for its neighbouring countries of those FDI detfirminants.

Collateral plays a very important role in financial markets. Without easy access to high-quality collateral, dealers and market participants would find it more costly to trade, with a negative impact on market liquidity and the real economy through increased financing costs. The role of collateral has become increasingly significant since the global financial crisis, partly due to regulatory reforms. Using bond-level data from both repo and securities lending markets, this paper introduces a new measure of collateral reuse and studies the drivers of the cost of obtaining high-quality collateral, i.e. the collateral scarcity premium, proxied by specialness of government bond repos. We find that the cost of obtaining high-quality collateral increases with demand pressures in the cash market (short-selling activities), even in calm financial market conditions. In bear market conditions - when good collateral is needed the most - this could lead to tensions in some asset market segments. Collateral reuse may alleviate some of these tensions by reducing the collateral scarcity premia. Yet, it requires transparency and monitoring due to the financial stability risks associated. Finally, we find that the launch of the ECB quantitative easing programme has a statistically significant, albeit limited, impact on sovereign collateral scarcity premia, but this impact is offset by the beginning of the ECB Securities Lending Programme.

AbstractThis paper examines the abnormal stock returns around the publication of 1167 reports issued by 26 brokerage firms on 37 small caps admitted to listing on the Italian Stock Market from 2003 to 2011. The focus is on small caps going public because for such firms information asymmetries may be severe and, therefore, analyst reports should be particularly valuable to the market. Several hypotheses are tested. First of all, the market impact is computed for the whole sample and for each recommendation category (buy, hold and sell). The exercise is repeated by controlling for the presence of contemporaneous news; by taking into account only the initiations of coverage; by selecting only the changes in recommendations. The results obtained through a standard event study methodology show that analyst reports on small caps are informative for the market, although the price impact differs across the samples considered. For the whole sample of reports, the cumulative abnormal returns estimated over a 3‐day event window around the publication date are statistically significant for buy and hold recommendations only (+0.98 and −0.83 per cent, respectively); however, after selecting out contaminating events only buys are significant (+1.13 per cent). Also the buy recommendations included in the initiation of coverage sample turn out to convey information to the market (+1.50 per cent); the highest price impact, however, is estimated for the upgrades included in the revisions of recommendation sample (+2.19 per cent). The second result of the paper is that information leakage is not widespread, given that abnormal returns are almost never significant before the report date. Therefore on average, the timing of the market reaction to financial research dissemination does not signal tipping or selective disclosure.