Costas Siriopoulos

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of an endogenous relationship between international financial reporting standards (IFRS) and sovereign credit ratings on the factors that determine foreign direct investments, by using an instrumental variable panel data framework. The results show that the adoption of IFRS by developed economies is interpreted by credit rating agencies as a positive sign that the firms will provide more transparent financial reports. In addition, the authors find that the consideration of the endogenous relationship between IFRS and credit ratings for developed economies highlights the importance of some variables that was not evident previously such as the degree of corruption and the educational level. Finally, the authors suggest that foreign direct investments are more easily attracted when one considers a joint factor which captures people’s perceptions about the ability of the government to implement policy and regulations that promote the development of public and private sector.

Keywords: credit ratings, IFRS, FDI determinants.
JEL Classification: C23, C26, M41, E51

International investors’ interest in the capital markets in the region of Gulf countries has dramatically increased in last two decades. Thus, it would be motivating to investigate their characteristics, where the January anomaly is a major one. This paper studies the veracity of the January effect rule in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) stock markets and examines the predictive power of January returns. Seven GCC stock markets are tested – the market indices in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia – from January 1, 2001 until December 31, 2018, a timeframe which has rarely been analyzed. Ordinary least square (OLS)-based dummy variable regression equation was used as the conventional econometric procedure in the works of financial calendar anomalies in stock markets. Some evidence is reported for the markets of Dubai and Kuwait. The paper also provides an additional explanation for the performance of stock market of Kuwait. The findings are opposite to the well documented evidence that emerging markets are less efficient and hence it is likely that several market anomalies are further pronounced. The results suggest that the predictive power of the January anomaly can be considered as a temporary anomaly in the GCC markets, since it is concentrated in only a couple of GCC markets and does not persist in time.

Although the coronavirus pandemic hit Europe in the early days of 2020, European stock markets had signaled fluctuations in the days before. This paper assesses the observed volatility on European stock exchanges and searches for its sources during the first four months of 2020. To investigate the issue, a panel VAR model is adopted, and the generalized impulse response function and the variance decomposition methods are used. The estimations show that about 34% of the volatility in European stock markets is due to the Chinese stock market, while 7% is due to international uncertainty, as measured by VIX. The impact of pandemic cases and deaths on European stock markets is negligible, below 1%. This means that the European stock market faced two risk elements: the first is the transmission volatility from the Chinese stock market, and the second is the international uncertainty. The findings also support the view that COVID-19 is more like a systematic risk.