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The purpose of this paper is to examine financial market integration in major South Asian financial markets: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Also to identify the required policy interactions and structural changes vital for broader economic integration.

This research opted for an empirical study employing co‐integration and causality techniques using a sample of stock and bond market data for major South Asian countries.

Empirical results show that both stock and bond returns are co‐integrated, indicating common stochastic trends. Stock market integration appears to be much stronger compared to the less developed and data deficient bond markets.

The study relies on widely cited empirical methodology. However, adopting alternative specifications and also allowing for time variant factors while examining inter‐linkages between stock and bond markets seem to be appropriate for robustness of results.

Increased integration would help in reducing arbitrage opportunities in these financial markets, having implications for market participants and promoting economic growth through financial deepening, in general. Since the degree of integration is dependent on policy and institutional infrastructure, ongoing efforts to develop financial sectors and reforms would need to be accelerated to further strengthen the degree of convergence between securities markets.

The paper fulfills an identified need to examine financial market integration in the SAARC region, using data for both stock and bond markets. This is the first study to use bond market data for SAARC countries and it also adds to the limited literature of bond market integration.

This study aims to observe the extent of asset diversification benefits in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-5 market by examining the effect of financial integration (FI) and financial development (FD) on domestic stock–bond co-movements, SBcorr.

The dynamic conditional correlation - multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (DCC-MGARCH) technique is adopted to construct FI and stock−bond co-movement variables. Then, the study uses static panel data analysis to examine the effect of FI on stock−bond co-movements.

FI does not provide asset diversification benefits due to high country risks in ASEAN-5. However, when FI is moderated by FD, FI × FD, the study shows that FI × FD provides higher asset diversification benefits in ASEAN-5.

This study shows the importance of incorporating the level of FD when assessing the effect of FI on stock–bond co-movements in ASEAN-5. In the presence of FI, a well-diversified investor should always consider the state of FD, which will show a better representation of asset diversification strategy in the emerging markets. Additionally, policymakers of ASEAN-5 countries should prioritise enhancing their financial system to attract more investment into the countries.

This paper examines the effect of bond market development on economic growth of selected developing countries from 1990 to 2020. Previous studies provide inconsistent results on the effect of bond market development on economic growth. Some results reveal positive effects while others show negative effects of bond market development on economic growth. These conflicting findings have motivated research.

The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and co-integration methods are used for analysis. The gross domestic product per capita proxies economic growth while government bond capitalisation and corporate bond capitalisation measure bond market development.

The findings unveil a long-term effect within the series. The results disclose that government bond capitalisation, trade openness and inflation positively affect economic growth while corporate bond capitalisation and domestic credit to the private sector presents negative effects on economic growth.

The results propose that the governments should issue more bonds to raise funds for long-term economic growth initiatives. The governments should promote bond market development such that the corporate bonds issued boost economic growth by limiting lengthy documentations and bottlenecks in the bond market listing and issue procedures. The policymakers and regulatory authorities should implement policies which attract investors and encourage companies' listing in the countries' bond markets.

The study’s findings add value that government bond capitalisation positively impacts economic growth, while corporate bond capitalisation negatively affects economic growth in developing countries.

In this chapter we investigate the response of bond markets to macroeconomic news announcements in the euro area. Specifically, we analyze the impact of (un)expected changes in the interest rate, unemployment rate, consumer confidence index and industrial production index on the returns, volatility and correlations of European government bond markets. Overall, our results suggest that, bond return volatility strongly reacts to news announcements and that the response is asymmetric. However, the influence of macroeconomic news announcements appears insignificant for bond returns. Finally, our results paint a complex picture of the effect of macroeconomic news releases on correlations.

This paper aims to examine whether the volatility of returns in commodity (gold, oil), bond and forex markets is related over time to the volatility of returns in equity markets of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam. In addition, the authors analyze the integration of the commodity, bond, forex and equity markets across these markets.

The dynamic conditional correlation GARCH (DCC-GARCH) model is used to capture the time-varying conditional correlation among markets. The authors use daily data of stock prices, oil prices, gold prices, exchange rates and 10 years' bond yields of the six countries from Datastream and investing.com from January 2001 to April 2021.

Findings reveal that the parameters of dynamic correlation are statistically significant which indicates the importance of time-varying co-movements. Estimation of the DCC-GARCH model suggests that the stock market is significantly correlated with bond, forex, gold and oil markets in all six countries.

This study has practical implications for policymakers and investment professionals. A better understanding of dynamic linkages among the markets would help in constructing effective hedging and portfolio diversification strategies. Policy makers can get insight to build proper strategies in order to insulate the economy from factors that cause volatility.

Several studies have investigated the linkage between commodity and stock markets and the volatility spillover effect, but very little attention is given to study the interrelationship between groups of market segments of different economies. No study has comparatively examined the dynamic relationship of multiple markets of a group of emerging countries simultaneously.

Market links (and price discovery) between financial assets and lead–lag relationships are topics of interest for financial economists, financial managers and analysts. The lead–lag relationship analysis should consider both short and long-term investors. From a portfolio diversification perspective, the first type of investor is generally more interested in determining the co-movement of financial assets at higher frequencies, which are short-run fluctuations, while the latter concentrates on the relationship at lower frequencies, or long-run fluctuations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

For this study, a technique was employed known as the wavelet approach, which has recently been imported to finance from engineering sciences to study the co-movement dynamics between global sukuk and bond markets. Data cover the period from January 2010 to December 2015.

The results indicate that: there is no unidirectional causality from developed market bond indices to Malaysia and Dow Jones indices, which is promising for fixed-income investors of a developed market; and in relation to emerging markets, the Malaysian sukuk market has a bidirectional causality with Indonesia, Malaysia, India and South Korea bond indices but not China bond indices, while in terms of the Dow Jones sukuk index, there is no unidirectional causality between the listed emerging markets and the sukuk index except Indonesia’s market during the sample period.

This analysis provides evidence regarding the timely and appropriate measure of correlation changes and the behaviour of sukuk and bond indices globally, which is beneficial to the management of sukuk and bond portfolios.

The evidence hitherto unexplored, which was produced by the application of a wavelet cross-correlation amongst the selected sukuk and bond indices, provides robust and useful information for international financial analysts as well as long and short-term investors.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the global and regional influences on the domestic term structure of nine Asian economies.

The dynamic Nelson Siegel model was used to extract the latent factors of a country’s yield curve movements in a state-space framework using the Kalman filter. The global and regional factors of the yield curve were extracted using the dynamic factor model. Further, the Bayesian inference of Gibbs sampling approach was used to identify the influence of global and regional factors on the domestic yield curve.

The results suggest that financial integration does not reduce the control of monetary authorities on the front end of the yield curve, and long-term interest rate is the potential transmission channel through which the contagion of the financial crisis spreads.

The results of this study would help the monetary authorities to understand the efficacy of the monetary policy transmission mechanism. It also offers the global investors diversification opportunities for investing in the Asian bond markets.

It is one of the earliest attempts to capture the global and regional yield curve movements and their impact on the emerging Asian economies yield curve. It contributes to literature by identifying the linkages in the long-term factor that is the potential channel through which crisis spreads.

This particular study examined the government bond price variations in order to determine the presence of excess volatility both at country and panel group level of BRICS countries context.

The study applied the autoregressive GARCH panel model approach proposed by Fakhry and Richter (2015) to evaluate the presence of excess volatility and then examined the diversification benefits. Further, the use of discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) has added the advantage to observe volatility across bonds along with potential diversification benefits by retaining information from the time and frequency domain perspective for both the maturities.

The main finding indicates that the excess volatility is present in BRICS countries at individual level i.e. in the case of Russia, India and China. However, the 10-year bond showing a less volatility compared to 5-year bond with the possibility of reaping out the benefits of diversification with international portfolio of sovereign bonds.

The main implication of the research is related to the non-perseverance of EMH as far sovereign bonds of BRICS countries are concerned as the results indicate presence of excess volatility in the 5-year and 10-year bond markets. However, the implicit behavior of 5-year bond could benefit the active fund managers and investors by taking an advantage of a reducing systemic risk through short-medium term investments.

This study contributes not only to the existing studies of similar nature by examining the excess volatility in bond markets but also taking account of co-moment of distinct maturities to confirm possible international diversification benefits for BRICS countries context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the international diversification benefits of Islamic bonds (Sukuk) for equity investors in conventional stock markets. The authors compare the diversification benefits of these securities with their conventional alternatives from advanced and emerging markets. Compared to conventional bonds, Sukuk are backed by tangible assets and carry both bond and stock-like features. Furthermore, the Sharia-based limitations limit the risk in these securities as a result of ethical investing rules. The regime-based model provides insight to possible segmentation (or integration) of these securities from global markets during different market states.

Risk spillover effects across conventional and Islamic stock and bond markets are examined using a Markov regime-switching GARCH model with dynamic conditional correlations (MS-DCC-GARCH). Weekly return series for conventional (advanced and emerging) and Islamic stock and bond indices are examined within a regime-dependent specification that takes into account low, high, and extreme volatility states. The DCC are then used to establish alternative diversified portfolios formed by supplementing conventional and Islamic equities with conventional and Islamic bonds one at a time.

Asymmetric shocks are observed from conventional stocks and bonds into Islamic bonds (Sukuk). Compared to emerging market bonds, Sukuk are found to display a different pattern in the transmission of global market shocks. The analysis of dynamic correlations suggests a low degree of association between Islamic bonds and global stock markets with episodes of negative correlations observed, particularly during market crisis periods. Portfolio performance analysis suggests that Islamic bonds provide valuable diversification benefits that are not possible to obtain from conventional bonds.

This study provides comprehensive analysis of volatility interactions and dynamic correlations across Islamic and conventional markets within a regime-based framework and provides insight to whether these securities could serve as safe havens or diversifiers for global investors. The findings have significant implications for global diversification strategies, particularly during market crisis periods.

Over the last few years, Central and East European economies have become more integrated with the West European economy. In general, these economies have become more market-oriented and restrictions on foreign investment have been relaxed. An important step in this development was the admission of eight East European countries to the European Union (EU) in 2004. As the economic ties between Western, Central and Eastern Europe strengthen, one would naturally expect the financial markets to follow suit and become more integrated as well. A good example is the historical case of the Italian and German government bond markets: Before 1999 these two markets differed markedly in terms of credit quality and price volatility, but since the creation of the Euro zone in 1999 they have become highly similar.