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The stock market is a common feature of a current economy and it is reputed to achieve some necessary functions, which promote the growth and development of the economy. To achieve this objective, the endogenous growth literature and research, and recent theoretical studies have tried to provide a link between the literature of endogenous growth theory and financial markets. Providing evidence of stock market development will assist policy makers in designing reforms that do indeed promote the growth rate, enhancing stock market development as economic growth through to the banking system of financial sectors, and to the degree of investor’s right; furthermore, allowing risk sharing encourages speculative and productive investment (see, e.g. Greenwood and Jovanovic (1990) and Bencivenga and Smith (1991)). The results of the previous study, which established positive links between the stock market and economic growth, suggests the pursuit of policies geared towards rapid development of the stock market.

The paper employed a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to examine the sources of technical efficiency in the Nigerian banking sub-sector. Using a cross section of commercial and merchant banks, the study showed that the Nigerian banking industry was not efficient both in the pre-and-post-liberalization era. The study further revealed that market share was the strongest determinant of technical efficiency in the Nigerian banking Industry. Thus, appropriate macroeconomic policy, institutional development and structural reforms must accompany financial liberalization to create the stable environment required for it to succeed. Hence, the present bank consolidation and reforms by the Central Bank of Nigeria, which started with Soludo and continued with Sanusi, are considered necessary, especially in the areas of e banking and reorganizing the management of banks.

This study examines bank competition in the loan markets in India using a new competitiveness index, the Augmented Relative Profit Difference (ARPD). The ARPD quantifies the impact of marginal costs on performance, measured in terms of market shares. The theoretical foundation of the ARPD is robust when compared to other conventional measures. Applying this unbiased competition indicator to loan markets shows that financial reform has contributed to significant improvements in competition. Public sector banks and private sector banks are more competitive than foreign banks too. In addition, we find that the Indian loanmarkets are monopolistic in nature.

In recent years the financial markets known a rapid development and become more and more complex. So, many regulatory requirements, focused on banks as well as insurance sector, have been developed. These regulatory are concentrated essentially on business risk control and required capital to cover risks. These requirements have influenced the asset allocation issue in insurance industry. These requirements have influenced the asset allocation issue in insurance industry. This section is interested by this issue. In first time it highlights some research works in this issue. Then we will investigate the relation between Solvency and optimal asset allocation. Finally we will explore the principal used methods in modeling asset and in choosing the optimal portfolio composition.

The study aims to examine the effects of oil price and exchange rate on unemployment in Malaysia. The empirical analysis commence by analyzing the time series property of data. The Johansen VAR-based co-integration technique was applied to examine the long run relationship between exchange rate, oil price and unemployment and found the long run relationship does exist. The vector error correction model was performed to check the short run dynamics and found that the short run dynamics are influenced by the estimated long run equilibrium. Granger causality was done and found that oil price does not affect unemployment but exchange rate has an influence on unemployment. Therefore, putting the exchange rate under control should be implemented to control unemployment.


 
 
 The last several years have seen an increase in the number of direct to consumer advertisements by pharmaceutical companies. Direct to Consumer advertisements (DTC) means targeting the end consumer through advertisements on television, radio, in newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. The qualitative study presents data and supports the need for a future quantitative study to ask physicians and consumers their opinions on whether pharmaceutical companies should be allowed to advertise directly to the end consumer. This article reviews the literature on this controversial topic, supporting the need to explore the reserach questions in greater detail. A review of the literature suggests there is financial motivation on the part of the pharmaceutical companies to increase their sales by advertsing directly to the end consumer as opposed to performing an educational service to the consumer.
 
 

Although Turkey has historically concentrated its trade with the European Union (EU) it has diversified its trade markets with the neighbouring regions and different group of countries during the last decade. Among them, Arab countries have come into prominence. Especially, following the “zero problems with neighbours” policy (ZPN), pursued by Turkey since 2002, the trade volume with the Middle Eastern neighbours has increased faster than that with its traditional partners. Nevertheless so called “Arab Spring” has started to manifest its effects on this trend. It deteriorates not only the economies of the concerned countries but also Turkey’s trade expansion. This paper aims: (i) to test through a gravity model the positive impacts of the ZPN policy and the negative impact of the Arab Spring on the trade expansion with the Spring Countries; and (ii) to reveal the positive impact of the policy change and the negative impact of the uprising movements on the realization of trade potential by Turkey in the Spring Countries.

A number of authors suggested that the impact of the macroeconomic factors on the incidence of the financial distress, and afterward in case of failure of companies. However, macroeconomic factors rarely, if ever, appear as variables in predictive models that seek to identify distress and failure; modellers generally suggest that the impact of macroeconomic factors has already been taken into account by financial ratio variables. This article presents a systematic study of this domain, by examining the link between the failure of companies and macroeconomic factors for the French companies to identify the most important variables and to estimate their utility in a predictive context. The results of the study suggest that several macroeconomic variables are strictly associated to the failure, and have a predictive value by specifying the relation between the financial distress and the failure.

The paper employs various measures of law enforcement to provide new evidence on the importance of legal institutions for different dimensions of financial development in transition economies. It offers a critical assessment of law enforcement measures employed in recent studies by showing that some proxies for law enforcement in the credit market may not be appropriate. Hence, care should be taken in how the quality of institutions is measured and the context which it represents. An original approach to measuring law enforcement in the credit market is developed by embodying the legal theory of dispute resolution and assessing this approach by collecting primary data for Kosovo. The findings suggest that Kosovo compares well with countries in the region andother transition economies in terms of the enforcement of creditor rights.

This study investigates the environmental conservation costs of the local authorities in Kenya by analyzing the data collected from 90 of these local authorities. The population of the study is the 175 local authorities in Kenya. A sample of 90 local authorities has been used. Both statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 17 and Excel have been used to determine the level of environmental conservation costs in the studied local authorities. The results indicated that there was a wide use of environmental conservation costs among the local authorities. The study provides preliminary evidence on environmental conservation costs used by local authorities in Kenya. Further research is suggested to explore the possible motivating factors among different local authorities’ degree of application and level of environmental costs in different activities.

The perceptions of Islamic banking professionals are surveyed through a questionnaire to explore whether the process of risk management mediates board involvement in risk management and risk management practices of Islamic banks in Malaysia and Egypt. The findings of this study identified that the Islamic banks in the selected countries are somewhat efficient in their risk management process. It was noticed that board involvement in risk management, process of risk management and risk management among Islamic banks in Malaysia are significantly higher than their counterparts in Egypt. Furthermore, high involvement of boards in risk management significantly increases the risk management process, and in turn, leads to significantly higher riskmanagement practices in Islamic banks. Hence, boards should take formal responsibility for setting, managing and periodically assessing the risk management culture of the banks. It is expected that the outcomes of this study would help policy setters in the selected countries to develop a well-structured and harmonized risk management process that enhance risk management practices, with emphasis on the effective involvements of the board of directors and Shari’ah supervisory boards in risk management practices.

The aim of this study to examine the performance of Support Vector Regression (SVR) which is a novel regression method based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) approach in predicting the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) National 100 Index daily returns. For bechmarking, results given by SVR were compared to those given by classical Linear Regression (LR). Dataset contains 6 technical indicators which were selected as model inputs for 2005-2011 period. Grid search and cross valiadation is used for finding optimal model parameters and evaluating the models. Comparisons were made based on Root Mean Square (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Theil Inequality Coefficient (TIC) and Mean Mixed Error (MME) metrics. Results indicate that SVR outperforms the LR for all metrics.

By employing non-parametric methods, namely Data Envelopment Analysis and Malmquist Index, this paper investigates efficiency of banks using a database of almost all banks in four countries in South-East Europe. The superior efficiency of foreignowned banks in intermediation is supported. It is argued that the improvement in efficiency of banks originated from the change in technology rather than scale and technical efficiency, and banks on average have not been able to catch-up with best-performers, thus widening the efficiency gap. The largest sources of inefficiency are found to be cost and scale inefficiencies and lending shortfalls. Because of its peculiarities, Kosovo banking sector is assessed relative to other economies. Findings suggest that despite some improvements, the banking system in Kosovo remained less efficient. A number of policy implications emanate from the findings, aiming at enhancing the intermediation efficiency of banks in the context of South-East European transition.

In today’s world most of the countries are following the market rule to determine their economic determinants with some to follow the mixed role of the government. There are a very few countries or states that are following the socialistic nature of development. One such country is Venezuela which has a long history of socialism and the degree of socialism got magnified under the regime of Hugo Chavez. The last election result in favour of Chavez has put some questions before the economists and politicians regarding its grounds. The present study has been framed in line with examining whether the role of economic factors have done the trick for Chavez to regain the presidential power. The study for the period of 1998-2010 has observed that the country has suffered in major economic factors compared to two Latin heroes Brazil and Argentina, albeit he has won the election. The study further observed that there are certain political grounds that played role for the favourable verdict.

In the present study we try to examine the exchange rate changes and financial flexibility as the economic stable indexes on the financial leverage use in the companies so the main issue in this study is to define the financial leverage relation with exchange rate changes and financial flexibility. That is why 88 companies of the companies listed in Tehran stock exchange in 2005–2011. The study type is descriptive–correlative and the multivariable linear regression was used to analyze the data. The findings from the hypotheses test state there is a significant relation between financial leverage and financial flexibility while there isn't relationbetween financial leverage and exchange rate changes.

In investigating the non-payment phenomenon in South Africa’s low income households, a case study of Protea Glenx the researcher employed quantitative tools and qualitative methods. The rationale was prompted by high level of evictions and repossessions for non-payment of mortgages in the Protea Glen area in Johannesburg South Africa. The research approach was to measure and draw sample size from the units of population, conduct interviews and captureand analyse data through the use of SPSS as a suitable statistical instrument. Furthermore, the aim was to employ a suitable model for measuring the relationship between dependent and independent variables and also to highlight the limitations of the study. The findings of the study revealed several interesting empirical results that underpinning the importance of borrower education for mortgage account holders and the need by the banking sector to properly empower borrowers about credit behaviour, responsibilities and obligations of owning a property plus the ongoing costs of ownership.

The objective of this study is to assess the share price reactions to smoking ban fatwa on Indonesia tobacco’s company. We expect that the smoking ban fatwa in the world’s largest Muslim population will hit the tobaccos industry revenues, lower tobacco’s company profit and eventually affect the share price of those firms. We use event study methodology and standard market model to calculate abnormal returns of the tobacco’s firms related to the news of smoking ban fatwa. Our study failed to find a statistically significant effect of smoking ban fatwa on tobacco’s firm stock market return. It suggests that the investors do not see the fatwa as a factor that may control the tobacco consumption in Indonesia – thus it may not affect the tobacco’s firm revenues and profit in the future

The banks in India have over 67,000 branches located across the country. All these are classified into two major categories, nonscheduled banks and scheduled banks. Scheduled banks includes commercial banks and the co-operative banks. The public sector banks are accountable for more than 78 percent of total banking industry in India. Even though private sector banks came later into the market, due to their customer servicing and easy banking features they are also competing equally with already existing public sector banks. so it is very essential to analyze how their financial performance is influenced by number of factors which willfurther suggest them where they need to concentrate more. in this article we have analyzed the correlation between return on total assets and other financial variables of selected private and public banks in India.

As two important constituents of China’s macro economy, there are a variety of relationships among China’s stock market, real estate market and its macro economy. In order to investigate these relationships, in this paper, especially with the Macroeconomic Boom Index reflecting China’s macro economy, we use cointegration theory and Granger analysis to demonstrate that there are long-term equilibrium relationship and bidirectional causality between the macro economy and the securities business, also between the macro economy and the real estate market, however, this kind of long-term Equilibrium relationship and bidirectional causality appears very weak.


 
 
 The study aims to examine winning brands influence on fans’ brand loyalty in Iranian professional football league. A ten-minute pen and paper questionnaire was distributed to fans of five superior teams of Iranian professional football league in 2009-2010 seasons. Team’s association questionnaire developed by Gladden and Funk (2001) was used for data collection. Reliability of the questionnaire was estimated by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. A structural equation model (SEM) test with maximum likelihood estimation was performed to test the relationships among the research variables using 912 participants. The findings showed three dimensions of brand associations influenced on fan’s brand loyalty of which the attitude was the most important. Benefits and attributes were placed in the second and third rank respectively. In addition, the obtained model of this research highlighted strong interactional effects between the three mentioned dimensions of brand associations.