This paper examines for the first time the relationship between the net issue values of aggregate bonds, as well as the different bond sectors separately, and economic growth. The other new feature of this study is the usage of quarterly data. Granger causalities are calculated for time series of 15 European countries, the USA, and Japan in order to test if there is a positive relationship between the development of bond markets and economic growth also for shorter time periods. The significant Granger causalities found show the following tendency: Economic growth is causal for net issue values of government bonds, and net issuance of corporate and financial institutions bonds are causal for economic growth. That finding is important for the future architecture of the financial sector, in particular in emerging markets and the new EU member countries. (author's abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

Several researchers have over the past decades criticised the efficient market hypothesis as several studies have presented evidence of causality and co-integrating relationships in  inancial markets. As preference shares have become increasingly popular, in recent years, as a mean of raising capital in the Swedish real estate sector, this study investigates the causal relationships between common shares and their corresponding preference share of nine listed Swedish real estate companies. By using daily closing prices over the period Dec 2014 – April 2016, we find weak support for short-run causalities in five of the nine examined pairs but no long-run cointegrating relationships. Further, we find causality running from the largest five firms to the four smallest in the sample firms. These findings violate the weak form of the efficient market hypothesis, which state that asset price fluctuations are random and not possible to forecast by the use of historical asset prices.