There has been considerable interest among market participants, market regulators and academics in the pricing of stock index futures contracts. Academic research in this area has been motivated by several considerations. First, the utility of these contracts for risk allocation and price discovery depends on the efficiency with which they are priced relative to the underlying index. Second, it has been widely believed that they have adverse impact on price dynamics in the stock market. Third, and most important, stock index futures offer the possibility of directly studying the economics of arbitrage in the context of market microstructure. This dissertation extends the theoretical framework on stock index futures pricing in two directions. First, within the static cost of carry framework, it generalises the forward pricing formula by allowing for cash market settlement procedures. Second, it shows that in the presence of arbitrage related transaction costs, the time series of stock index futures "mispricing" can be modelled as a threshold autoregressive (TAR) process, a piecewise linear autoregressive process in which the process parameters are path dependent. The TAR model is potentially attractive for many financial applications and this dissertation appears to be the first use of the TAR model in finance. This dissertation also provides substantial and significant new empirical evidence relevant to the theoretical issues involved. Inter-alia, it analyses several important aspects not adequately examined in past research, and it utilises the unique microstructural features of the London stock market to explore several major theoretical issues. The empirical analysis is based mainly on about four years of "time and sales" transactions data from the London International Financial Futures Exchange together with synchronous hourly cash index data.

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The empirical evidence relating to the stock market reaction to domestic joint ventures (JV) announcements suggest that the mean abnormal returns (MARs) and cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) are consistently positive, whilst those of international joint venture (IJVs) are mixed. One neglected but obvious influence of the stock market response to IJV announcements is the way they are financed. The preference for project finance over corporate finance in the financing of IJVs may have a role to play in this context. Compared with capital structure theories, this gap is seen as quantifying the role of the type of structure or debt (project or corporate finance) plays in shareholder value creation upon announcement. Using a cross-sectional study comprising of a finnal sample of 394 IJV announcements made from the years 2005 to 2010 and retrieved from the Securities Data Company (SDC) database, an event study methodology was used to derive MARs and CARs in a 2l-day window (-10,+10). The MARs and CARs are integrated into regression analyses to examine the specific role the type of finance plays in shareholder value creation upon announcement by controlling for project specific, host nation characteristics and sponsor-specific variables. The findings of the research establish that IJVs on average create value upon announcement but does not have a lasting impact on stock market valuation. As expected, the financial markets' response to IJV announcement during and after the global financial crisis (2008-2010) was not favourable. It was also found that the choice of finance matters in the market response to IJV announcements with project finance having a higher probability of eliciting a significant positive market reaction. Finally, the study revealed that whilst sector and gearing has an impact on MARs and CARs, the legal origin of the host country of the IJV did not make an impact upon announcement.

In general, CEO turnover has been researched widely following numerous studies in developed countries. Nevertheless, the determinants of CEO turnover are still unclear in transition countries of which the legal and regulatory framework are weak and financial systems and corporate governance are underdeveloped. Therefore, examining determinants of CEO turnover in Vietnam, a transition country, helps to provide more evidence on the efficiency and effectiveness of corporate governance in transition countries. Furthermore, the examination helps to define weaknesses, and it, therefore, could provide guidance to improve corporate governance in Vietnamese enterprises. Particularly, the thesis investigates the CEO turnover in Vietnam following the research philosophy of positivism paradigms and deductive approach. Further, it implied logistics regression in order to evaluate the influences of factors on CEO turnover in Vietnamese-listed enterprises. The sample of the thesis, including 156 listed firms at the end of 2006 in Hanoi and HoChiMinh Securities Centres, 780 firm-year observations have been conducted. Among 780 observations, there are 88 CEO turnovers occurred during the observed period from 2006 to 2010. The main findings of the thesis show that firm performance had significant inverse relationship with the likelihood of CEO turnover. Meanwhile, the influence of ownership structure on CEO turnover was insignificant. Interestingly, aged CEOs in Vietnamese-listed enterprises were more likely to be dismissed than young CEOs. Additionally, the probability of CEO turnover significantly increased when CEOs reached the ages of 59-61. The certain age also reduced the influence of CEO duality on CEO turnover. Together, CEO ownership negatively influenced the sensitivities of the link between firm performance and CEO turnover, although the influence is insignificant when CEOs own less than 5% of firm shares. Importantly, the thesis provides the significant and positive relationship between the percentage of independent directors and CEO turnover. Based on those findings, the thesis concludes that the efficiency of corporate governance and effectiveness of management are able to improve by increasing the independence of the Board of Management rather than other factors.

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