The recent growth of exchanges has generated large trading platforms for investors. The largest of these institutions, the Intercontinental Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange group are now responsible for clearing trades for the majority of investors worldwide and are perhaps, as large commercial banks are, too big to fail. This has attracted attention from international regulating bodies to impose strict risk management standards on the exchanges to ensure financial stability. In this thesis, we identify first, that an investor in the market is strongly affected by margins set by the exchanges in determining the transaction costs of a trade. We discuss the possibility that a volatile margin movement would introduce further risks for such an investor causing them to raise more capital to cover possible margin calls which can perhaps lead to procyclicality. We follow this work by addressing how margins can be determined in adherence to the new laws. Exchanges are now required to set margins based on the Value-at-Risk, hence we search for the best Value-at-Risk method for margining use. Here, we find that the simple Orthogonal Exponentially Weighted Moving Average method is sufficient in forecasting the Value-at-Risk, which contradicts a fair body of the literature who suggests that complex developments of GARCH are superior. We then offer methods for setting and evaluating margin requirements upon the Value-at-Risk estimates, concentrating on producing stable margin requirements. The automated methods produced in our work outperform all other methods available in the literature. Furthermore, we are the first to provide methods for assessing margin stability. Our work is timely in addressing the current affairs of the world economy and is among the first to tackle the margin stability issue in detail.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 124-130).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-107). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-107). Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation contains two essays that use empirical techniques to shed light on open questions in the asset pricing literature. In the first essay, I investigate whether foreign institutional investors affect stock liquidity in domestic equity markets. The evidence indicates that stocks with higher foreign institutional ownership subsequently experience higher liquidity. However, it is difficult to interpret the causal relation of this finding because institutional investors self-select into more liquid stocks. To solve this problem, I exploit a provision in the 2003 US dividend tax cut which extends tax-relief to dividends from US tax-treaty countries but not to dividends from non-treaty countries. This natural experiment suggests a causal link between foreign institutional investors and liquidity. Consistent with the predictions of theoretical models, I find that liquidity improves due to foreign institutional investors increasing information competition. In the second essay, I introduce a new measure of difference of opinion using mutual fund portfolio weights to test prominent competing theories of the effect of heterogeneous beliefs on asset prices. The over-valuation theory (Miller (1977)) proposes that in the presence of short-sale constraints stock prices reflects only the view of optimistic investors which implies lower subsequent returns. Alternatively, neo-classical asset pricing models (Williams (1977), Merton (1987)) suggest that differences of opinions indicate high levels of information uncertainty or risk which implies higher expected returns. My initial result finds no support for the over-valuation theory. Instead, the measure used in this study finds that high differences of opinion stocks weakly outperform low differences of opinion stocks by 2.42% annually which is more consistent with the information uncertainty explanation. / text

The worldwide financial services industry has undergone in the past two decades an unprecedented wave of consolidation within and across its three main sub-sectors: banking, securities activities and insurance. Today's observers assert that in ten years, most of the financial sector will be controlled by a small group of huge diversified banks. By enacting the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, Congress repealed the depression-era "Glass-Steagall" Act of 1933 and thereby officially removed the longstanding legal barriers that insulated banks from securities firms and insurance companies. As promoters of financial convergence have long been claiming that the introduction of universal banks in the United States would produce numerous benefits for themselves, but also for the economy and for their customers, these predictions can be assessed today in the light of empirical analysis. Now that "financial supermarkets" are totally legal in the United States, it is essential to assess whether they are economically and morally viable.

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This study is concerned with investigating the structural relationship between stock markets and economic variables in different countries. In investigating the relationships, the following six questions are posed:- Are stock markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, West Germany, France, Norway, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and South Africa related to each other and do they influence each other? Does the level of any relationship change over time? Are variables representing economic activity in each country related to similar variables in the other countries? Does the level of any economic relationship change over time? Are the comovements of both equity markets and economic indicators consistent? and Are stock markets examined in this study influenced by similar common underlying factors? The empirical results suggest positive answers to these questions. The main findings from the study suggest that equity returns are related and although some markets have a higher degree of similarity, the covariance between international equity returns remain stable over the short period but tend to change in the long run. It is also found that economic variables of different countries are related in a consistent way to the equity markets. Finally it is shown that stock prices in each country are systematically affected by similar economic factors.