The dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay investigates how oil market factors impact on liquidity commonality in global equity markets. I identify two transmitting channels of the effect on liquidity commonality, namely oil price return and volatility. Using a sample of firms drawn from 50 countries spanning from Jan 1995 to Dec 2015, I find that both effects in oil explain the liquidity commonality in countries with higher integration to oil market. In addition, I show that oil volatility effect is more pronounced in net oil exporters compared to net oil importers after controlling for oil sensitivity. My findings suggest that oil volatility effect on liquidity commonality is more substantial for high oil sensitive countries than oil price return effect except five OPEC members, where liquidity commonality is highly influenced by oil the return along with volatility. These results are robust to controlling for possible sources of liquidity commonality as found in the literature. In the second essay, I study the impact of stock liquidity on firms’ future investments. Since stock liquidity decreases the cost of equity, I expect firms’ future investments to increase with stock liquidity. Secondly, I argue that this relation is more pronounced in more financially constrained firms because of their limited access to external capital. Using a sample of more than 9800 firms, from 21 emerging markets and spanning from 2000 to 2015, I find supportive and robust evidence of a positive association between stock liquidity and firms’ future investments. Furthermore, my findings strongly suggest that the liquidity impact on corporate investments is highly influenced by the firms’ financial constraint levels, using four different definitions of financial constraints. My findings are robust due to controlling for other determinants of future investment suggested in the previous literature, and due to controlling for the country and time effects. In addition, the results seem to be consistent with the use of alternative measures of corporate investments and stock liquidity and with alternative model specifications and estimation methodologies.

The main objective of this study is to examine the long run relationship between stock market development and economic growth in the case of South Africa. The study used quarterly data covering the period from 1990Q1 to 2010Q4. To empirically test the link between the two variables, the study used the Johnson’s cointegration approach and Granger causality so as to test the direction of the relationship. The Vector Error Correction Model was also employed to capture both short run and long run dynamics. Generally, the results reveal that a long run relationship exists between the two variables and the causality flows from economic growth to stock market development. Also, the extent to which of stock market development impacts on growth is statistically weak.

This thesis focuses on fractal analysis of economic time series. Chapter One introduces fractal analysis as a method of exploring time series and gathers information about progress and current state of understanding in this field. Chapter Two focuses on design and development of computer software, which will calculate selected fractal indices. Chapter Three is experimental and shows the results and discussion of economic time series (popular stock market indexes and currency exchange rate) analysis that have been obtained from the software developed in Chapter Two.

This master's thesis deals with stock market of the Czech Republic under financial crisis conditions. It is divided into a theoretical and a practical part. The theoretical part describes a stock price, most significant stock bubbles and fundamental, technical and psychological analysis. The practical part of this thesis is dedicated to an up-to-date stock valuation of three representative stock companies quoted on Prague Stock Exchange by using the fundamental analysis. The technical analysis is applied as an additional approach. The main target of this thesis is to verify whether the current Czech stock market can not be designated as a stock bubble any more in contrast to a situation before the financial crisis.

This work focuses on the Czech stock market. Work is focused on the application of the theory of efficient markets, which is one of the theories explaining the evolution of prices of securities, the stock market in the Czech Republic from 2000 to 2008. Efficient market theory represents a random walk, which is used as a tool to describe the phenomenon where the future price changes are random divergence from past prices. The thesis is divided into several parts. The first part presents an actual stock market in the Czech Republic. Because most of the work deals with the analysis yields the PX stock index was that in the next section in detail described and analyzed. Furthermore, the Czech stock market has been analyzed in terms of structure and trading volume. The next section has described the theory of efficient markets. Was described briefly the history of this theory. Another part of this work can be described as a purely practical. First, the work focuses on the market in the one year time series of returns. In second part were analyzed medium-long term consisting of three year time series of returns. The last analyzed period was long term, consisting of eight-year time series of returns from 2000 to 2008.

The objective of the thesis is to characterize the importance of information and consequently also of knowledge as the bases for active dealing in the stock market. The fundamental terms of information credibility, disinformation and information asymmetry, which have a cardinal effect on behaviour of particular participants of the market, are mentioned in the thesis. The theory of effective markets and the factors due to which it is not able to explain the development and the real state of the contemporary stock markets, are analysed in more detail in the thesis. A considerable part of the thesis is devoted to the analysis and the definition of information need as a basic requirement for making successful investment decisions of an individual, whereas ways to its fulfilment are implied -- including a description and a division of available information sources. The description and the analysis of several dealing strategies which are directly based on usage of various kinds of information are not missing in the thesis. A part of the work is a presentation and an analysis of the results of a research made among real investors.

The financial market anomaly can be characterized as the event when observed stock returns differentiate from those expected by concrete pricing model. Many anomalies have been detected so far, and some of them vanished, while other persisted, after they had been published by academics and researchers. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential presence of selected types of anomalies in the financial markets and to provide relevant empirical evidence. The theoretical section will supply the reader with the descriptions of several types of financial market anomalies and the results of past studies documenting the existence of these anomalies, with possible reasons justifying the presence of this phenomenon. The analytical section will focus on the few selected anomalies and test whether they are still present in the selected financial markets.

This thesis deals with the impacts of information and communication technology investment surge on USA economic growth in the 1990s. Besides others, rapid development of these technologies also led to the creation of a stock market bubble, which affected the expansion phase of the economic cycle. Its burst in 2000-2001 resulted in economic slow-down and end of the longest recorded economic expansion in the history of the United States. Main part of the thesis discusses the benefits of information technology for economy and further evaluates the role of the speculative bubble in the development of consumption and investment expenditures. The thesis results suggest that the increase in capital intensity and sharp stock market price inflation significantly accelerated the dynamics of the economic growth in the second half of the described cycle.

This thesis consists of three related essays that examine investors' order submission strategies during the pre-opening period on the Malta Stock Exchange. The pre-opening is a period of liquidity formation and price discovery characterised by the absence of trade execution. The three essays collectively examine the information content of the order book in relation to: the intensity of order submissions, the aggressiveness of investors' order placement strategy and the determination of returns generated over the pre-opening period.The first essay empirically investigates if public information concerning the current state of the order book impacts the duration between order arrivals. Utilizing an augmented ACD model, the research reveals that the information which can be inferred from the characteristics of incoming orders has a more significant impact on the intensity of buy order submissions as compared to sell order submissions during the pre-opening period. Furthermore, prospective buyers appear to be more responsive to liquidity provided by the sell side than the reverse. Locked or crossed order submissions tend to increases (decreases) the intensity of order flow on the own (opposite) side of the order book, corroborating Cao et al. (2000) that such order-types contain informative signals about the fundamental value of the asset.The second essay analyses the impact of limit order book information on the aggressiveness observed in the submission, revision and cancellation of limit orders during the market pre-opening period. The empirical results indicate that the aggressiveness of order submissions and forward price revisions react both to the existing and subsequent changes in the execution probability at market opening, driven in part by the depth on either side of the order book. The aggressiveness of order cancellations increases on both sides of the order book when the depth at the top of the ask order book increases. In addition, the results suggest that the order book height and size of the inside spread impacts the aggressiveness of order submissions, revisions and cancellations.The third essay studies the contribution of the pre-opening period to the daily price discovery process and the factors that impact the return generated over this period. The results indicate that approximately one third of daily price discovery occurs in the pre-opening period. In addition, the impact of relative depth and height of the overnight and opening order book are concentrated at the top of the order book. Furthermore, cumulative changes to relative depth attributable to order submissions most significantly impact the opening returns of less actively traded stocks. The results show a strong relationship between opening returns and cumulative changes in the relative height along the order book attributable to order submissions, cancellations and forward and backward price revisions over the pre-opening period.

This article seeks to analyze the liability regulation of different agents which participate in public offer securities in Peru and the economic reasons for regulation for allocation of that liability. / El presente artículo busca analizar el tratamiento de la responsabilidad de los distintos actores que participan en una oferta públicade valores mobiliarios en el Perú y las razones económicas de la regulaciónpara la asignación de dicha responsabilidad.