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This study explores the financial performance and economic impact of British investment in the Colombian National Railway Company, the largest British direct investment in Colombia during the first period of globalisation. It aims to ascertain the railway's impact on the regional economy and explain why it failed as a going concern. It explores three dimensions: the use of guaranteed railway bonds, the financial performance of the company, and the economic impact within different sectors of the local economy. The article implements existing methods such as financial analysis, internal rate of return, social savings, counterfactual analysis, and tailors these to a case study methodology for a micro business history of a single company. The article provides three main conclusions. Railway bond guarantees were critical to completion of the railway but detrimental to its long-term financial viability. The company was operationally profitable but stymied by construction delays. The railway contributed to growth of the export sector, internal agricultural trade, and government revenues. Contributions include tailoring the social savings method to a local rather than national focus, re-evaluation of the role of railways in Colombian economic growth, and exploring the influence of railways on internal trade within Latin American economies. Supplemental data for this article is available online at .This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I aim to explore the effect of good governance on equity returns, and empirically investigate if governance at the country level has asset pricing implications and contributes to the idiosyncrasy of price jumps. Jumps are found to be far less systematic than the smooth (non-jump) component of country price indexes. Hence, if jumps are more idiosyncratic, governance should primarily affect the jump risk component. This is good news for international investors, because diversification provides insurance against jumps. Relying on an equilibrium asset-pricing model in an economy under jump diffusion, I decompose the moments of the returns of international stock markets into a diffusive (systematic) risk and a (idiosyncratic) jump risk part. For a balanced panel of 52 countries, my results suggest that governance is an important determinant of (idiosyncratic) jump risk. Stock markets in poorly governed countries are characterized by higher volatility and more negative return asymmetry, primarily driven by the higher jump risk. Regulatory quality, the government effectiveness and the control of corruption appear to be most important. Results are robust to the inclusion of various controls for other country- or market-specific characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using 5-minute high frequency data from the Chinese stock market, we employ a non-parametric method to estimate Fama-French portfolio realized jumps and investigate whether the estimated positive, negative and sign realized jumps could forecast or explain the cross-sectional stock returns. The Fama-MacBeth regression results show that not only have the realized jump components and the continuous volatility been compensated with risk premium, but also that the negative jump risk, the positive jump risk and the sign jump risk, to some extent, could explain the return of the stock portfolios. Therefore, we should pay high attention to the downside tail risk and the upside tail risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the stylized facts, correlation and interaction between volatility and returns at the 5-minute frequency for gold, silver, platinum and palladium from May 2000 to April 2015. We study the full sample period, as well as three subsamples to determine how high-frequency data of precious metals have developed over time. We find that over the full sample, the number of trades has increased substantially over time for each precious metal, while the bid-ask spread has narrowed over time, indicating an increase in liquidity and price efficiency. We also find strong evidence of periodicity in returns, volatility, volume and bid-ask spread. Returns and volume both experience strong intraday periodicity linked to the opening and closing of major markets around the world while the bid-ask spread is at its lowest when European markets are open. We also show a bilateral Granger causality between returns and volatility of each precious metal, which holds for the vast majority subsamples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an agent-based model we examine the dynamics of stock price fluctuations and their rates of return in an artificial financial market composed of fundamentalist and chartist agents with and without confidence. We find that chartist agents who are confident generate higher price and rate of return volatilities than those who are not. We also find that kurtosis and skewness are lower in our simulation study of agents who are not confident. We show that the stock price and confidence index—both generated by our model—are cointegrated and that stock price affects confidence index but confidence index does not affect stock price. We next compare the results of our model with the S&P 500 index and its respective stock market confidence index using cointegration and Granger tests. As in our model, we find that stock prices drive their respective confidence indices, but that the opposite relationship, i.e., the assumption that confidence indices drive stock prices, is not significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cutting costs to boost suboptimal levels of return on equity (RoE) is becoming essential for capital market firms in the current climate of tepid revenue growth and regulatory changes. Fundamental restructuring of operations through adoption of shared service and industry utilities can enable longterm cost reduction. A few financial institutions have been using internal utilities for some time now. The next stage in this evolution is the external utility model, through which banks completely outsource their technology and processes to the utility provider. External utilities are a recent phenomenon seen largely in the last 18 to 24 months. Primarily, the functions that are non-core and non-differentiating for a financial institution are best suited for outsourcing to a utility. The areas that have seen utility-type solutions include mid-back office functions such as post-trade processing, collateral management, reference data management, regulatory reporting and transfer agency service, as well as some front-office activity such as know your customer (KYC) services. While the utility model can offer significant benefits to user institutions, lack of awareness and resistance to change, lack of customisability, difficulties in establishing common governance and frameworks, and regulatory and data security issues could present challenges that may impact adoption of these utilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- The purpose of this paper is to examine the applicability of stock selection criteria of Benjamin Graham in Indian capital market to determine which rules specifically can help the investors to augment their return on investment. Design/methodology/approach -- The independent sample t-test has been employed to examine the stock return differences among the companies which fulfill maximum number of the criteria and the companies fulfilling minimal number. The significance of the excess returns yielded by the criteria is assessed through one sample t-statistics. Further, the applicability of each and every criterion is examined using pooled OLS regression analysis. Findings -- The mean market adjusted returns of the companies which fulfill maximum number of the criteria are significantly different from the companies which fulfill minimal number. The companies those are able to fulfill at least any five criteria, yield excess returns to the investors. However, regression analysis makes it evident that all the criteria are not applicable in present economic environment. Research limitations/implications -- The study recommends that an investor should give due importance to variables mainly high earnings yield, discount to tangible book value and net current asset value, lower leverage and stability in earnings in order to screen value maximizing securities. Originality/value -- This paper extends discussion on application of Graham's stock selection criteria in Indian stock market. The study also enriches the literature on value investing strategies by extending discussion on reasons for the applicability/inapplicability of the Graham's stock selection criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]