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International Monetary Fund. Monetary and Capital Markets Department
This paper discusses key findings of the Detailed Assessment of Implementation of the IOSCO (International Organization of Securities Commissions) Objectives and Principles of Securities Regulation on the United States. The United States has large, well-developed, and complex securities and derivatives markets. Postcrisis, the legal mandates of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have significantly expanded. The level of funding of both the SEC and CFTC is a key challenge affecting their ability to deliver on their mandates in a way that provides confidence to markets and investors. The fragmented structure of equity markets remains a key challenge for the SEC.
International Monetary Fund. African Dept.
This Selected Issues paper discusses the potential fiscal impact of a large-scale gas project and explores aspects of macro-fiscal management of the associated revenue flow. The chapter also provides background and context focusing on recent offshore natural gas discoveries. The paper also describes features of the current petroleum fiscal regime in Tanzania and will present tentative simulations of the fiscal impact of a potential gas project. A string of natural gas discoveries in Tanzania’s deep offshore waters have generated considerable expectations. The outlook for natural gas in Tanzania is positive, albeit still highly uncertain. If major revenues are obtained and put to fruitful use, they could have a transformational impact on the economy. At the same time, expectations need to be tempered by the remaining uncertainty about the eventual size of the gas resources; no company has yet made a final investment decision involving the deep offshore gas reserves. This uncertainty will hopefully diminish in the next few years.
Mr. Fabian Lipinsky
and
Ms. Li L Ong
Stock markets play a key role in corporate financing in Asia. However, despite their increasing importance in terms of size and cross-border investment activity, the region’s markets are reputed to be more “idiosyncratic” and less reliant on economic and corporate fundamentals in their pricing. Using a model that draws on international asset pricing and economic theory, as well as accounting literature, we find evidence of greater idiosyncratic influences in the pricing of Asia’s stock markets, compared to their G-7 counterparts, beyond the identified systematic factors and local fundamentals. We also show proof of a significant relationship between the strength of implementation of securities regulations and the “noise” in stock pricing, which suggests that improvements in the regulation of securities markets in Asia could enhance the role of stock markets as stable and reliable sources of financing into the future.
Mr. Martin D. Cerisola
and
Mr. Jorge A Chan-Lau
This paper assesses productivity trends in Canada vis-a-vis the United States from two perspectives. The first one is based on estimates of total factor productivity. The second one decomposes productivity growth into two sources: investment-specific technical change, associated with improvements in the quality of the capital stock, and neutral technical change, associated with the organization of productive activities. The results indicate that investment-specific technical change is the major underlying cause of the pickup in productivity in Canada and the narrowing of the productivity gap with the United States.
Mr. Alberto Chong
and
Ms. Luisa Zanforlin
Evidence from historical and epidemiological literatures show that epidemics tend to spread in the population according to a logistic pattern. We conjecture that the impact of new technologies on output follows a pattern of spread not unlike that of typical epidemics. After reaching a critical mass, rates of growth will accelerate until the marginal benefits of technology are fully utilized. We estimate spline functions using a GMM dynamic panel methodology for 79 countries. We use imports of machinery and equipment as a fraction of gross domestic product as a proxy for the process of technological adoption. Results confirm our hypothesis.