Guest editorial

Citation

Floros, C. (2008), "Guest editorial", Managerial Finance, Vol. 34 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/mf.2008.00934gaa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Managerial Finance, Volume 34, Issue 7.

The theme of this special issue is “Greek financial market: 1999-2001”. This special issue of Managerial Finance focuses on the critical period of the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE), i.e. the period of crisis from 1999 to 2001. We investigate a number of hypotheses in order to explain the course of the ASE before and after the crisis. We selected five papers as follows:

1. 1.

   Monthly and trading month effects: this paper investigates the calendar effects in Greece using daily data before and after the crisis of 1999-2001. The results show that there is no January effect, and hence daily returns are not higher in January than in any other month. Also, the results for the trading month effect show higher (but not significant) returns over the first fortnight of the month.

2. 2.

   Corporate governance rating: this paper explores the main aspects of corporate governance (CG) of family-owned listed companies in Greece. In addition, the paper develops a CG rating methodology on the current state of CG in Greece. The main conclusion from this paper is that the family firms are demonstrated poor governance compared with non-family firms and the ASE Index companies.

3. 3.

   Political elections and the ASE: this paper examines the influence of the Greek political elections on the course of the ASE. Using daily data from the ASE General Price Index, the paper examines the effect of political elections on the course of the ASE over the period 1996-2002. The empirical results show a negative (but not significant) “political” effect before and after the election dates.

4. 4.

   Forecasting Value-at-Risk (VaR) and volatility: this paper evaluates the performance of symmetric and asymmetric ARCH models in forecasting both the one-day-ahead VaR and the realized intra day volatility of two equity indices in the ASE. The results show that the most appropriate method for the Bank index is the symmetric model with normally distributed innovations, while the asymmetric model with asymmetric conditional distribution applies for the General index. Also, there is not a particular model that can be applied for both indices. Thus, as concerns the volatility of the Greek stock market, although it is predictable, there is not an explicit model, which is the most accurate for all the forecasting purposes.

5. 5.

   Efficiency of futures market: this paper examines efficiency of the Greek stock index futures market from 1999 to 2001. The results show that the Greek futures and spot prices form a stable long run relationship. For both FTSE/ASE-20 and FTSE/ASE mid 40, futures markets play a price discovery role, implying that futures prices contain useful information about spot prices. Futures markets are informationally more efficient than underlying stock markets in Greece.

I wish to thank all of the authors who submitted manuscripts for this special issue, the referees for their comments and the Editor in Chief of Managerial Finance for publishing this special issue

Christos FlorosUniversity of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK