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The paper aims at analyzing the co-movements between stock returns and oil prices (West Texas Intermediate, Brent) controlling or not for COVID-19.

It uses continuous wavelet transforms and wavelet coherence over the period July 19, 2019 to August 16, 2021 based on daily data. Continuous wavelet transforms provide an over complete representation of stock returns signals by letting the translation and scale parameters of the wavelets vary continuously.

There are not significant evidence supporting the fact that the COVID-19 has altered the relationship between stock returns and oil prices except perhaps in the case of South Africa. In fact, Southern African Development Community stock markets react more to oil prices than to health shock such as the COVID-19.

The findings of the study are original and have not been published anywhere prior.

After considering the price reversal among countries' indices as a global, coordinated and generalized phenomenon, this paper aims to examine the profitability of the reversal strategy internationally and find an economically essential and predictive reversal effect. Indices' portfolios form based on the prior 48 months; prior losers outperform prior winners by 8.86% per year during the subsequent 48 months. Interestingly, the reversal effect is substantially stronger for emerging countries, yielding 14.04% annually. It remains profitable post-globalization, countering the concern of whether the integration of equity markets synchronized the price reversal worldwide. Returns' differences consistent with portfolio formation approaches are also observed.

This study follows the methodology De Bondt and Thaler (1985) set out and uses the same methodological framework Wouassom et al. (2022) put forward. Nevertheless, this study does not focus on stocks. Still, it employs global equity indices from the viewpoint of an international investor who can switch between worldwide equity indices using a contrarian trading strategy.

My findings indicate that reversal strategies with overlapping portfolios are profitable over the entire sample period and every formation and holding period. These returns are highly statistically significant and vary considerably from one horizon to another. More importantly, the reversal strategies remain, on average, profitable and significant in the period post-1994 but are not particularly distinctive, which implies that the reversal effect survives the globalization impact and indicates that the integration of equity markets together with the international correlation among markets do not synchronize the prices reversal effect around the world given that.

Further work would be recommended to study a more extended period dating back to the nineteenth century or the Victorian Era, characterised by rapid economic development in almost every domain, to verify if reversal is historically compensation for carrying risks exclusively during contraction.

My analysis takes on particular significance given the association between lagged market movement in share prices and investors’ optimism that appears among traders, generating an increasing reversal effect (Siganos and Chelley-Steley, 2006) and has direct implications for predicting and controlling trading costs associated with asset allocation strategies.

The difficulty with using the reversal strategy to uncover the long-term return reversal effects in the equity markets today resides in the fact that the globalization of the economy has fuelled the concentration of assets within institutional investors. The critical insight is that the concentration of equity in the hands of institutional investors activated international equity trading. These institutional investors seek to maximize their shareholder value from the opportunity by simultaneously dealing in many markets while constructing and holding portfolios that include assets from various countries using highly profitable investment strategies such as reversal.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to show an easily implemented contrarian strategy that switches back and forth between country indices and generates extraordinarily high abnormal returns of more than 8.86% per annum. We also show that these returns compensate for global risks and for investors ready to take them during contraction.

The study investigates the role of macroeconomic policies in driving capital market development in emerging African countries where the markets are relatively active. It aims to determine the effects of these policies in pre-pandemic period vis-a-vis the post-pandemic period.

The generalized method of moments (GMM) and auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) are employed in estimating the role within the period 2012Q1-2023Q3. The panel unit root test is used to ascertain the stationary status of variables, while maximum likelihood estimator is employed to determine structural stability of the model.

The empirical results reveal that fiscal and monetary policies played significant positive role in capital market development in both pre- and post-pandemic periods. On the other hand, trade policy and investment return had significant impact in pre-pandemic period which could not be sustained in post-pandemic period. It is only exchange rate policy that remained insignificant in both periods. The findings therefore suggest that capital market development slowed in the post-pandemic period due to reduced performance of macroeconomic policies. Furthermore, the unit root test reveals that all the variables satisfy empirical properties that ensure estimation results are consistent and non-spurious. The maximum likelihood estimator showed there was long-term structural break, hence short-term impacts were used in comparative analysis.

Macroeconomic policies are fundamental to financial market development in developing countries. The role in resuscitating capital market in the post-pandemic period has yet to be adequately investigated in African countries. This study is carried out to fill this void.

Studies purchasing behaviour for the leading brands of a frequently bought household product and discusses this. Enquires in depth about the nature and habits of those buyers of a brand – who in a given time period purchase that brand to the exclusion of competitors. Focuses on the purchasing behaviour of sole buyers (who mostly buy only one particular brand). Examines the incidence of sole buyers; frequency of buying, and period‐to‐period repeat buying; how many in a given period; how often purchased in that period; and how many buy it again in the next period? Concludes that present findings give one answer – showing that the sole buyer as defined is more regular in his/her buying behaviour than is the average buyer of the brand.

A very important concern of physical distribution managers is deciding the location of warehouses (distribution centres or depots). It is, therefore, not surprising that this location problem has been receiving considerable research attention and indeed, some impact has been made in actual industrial warehouse location decisions. The interested reader is referred to the expository articles, which describe both the theoretical developments and some practical applications of the theory.

Several articles in the popular press have detailed an end-of-year anomaly known as the Santa Claus Rally, a period best defined as the last five trading days of December and the first two trading days of January. The purpose of this paper is to examine US stock market returns over this period from 1926 to 2014.

The authors examine the Santa Claus Rally by relating it to firm size in the stock markets of the USA. The Santa Claus Rally consists of the last five trading days in December and the first two in January. The authors use t-tests, non-parametric test and regression analysis to determine if investors in small firms get superior returns over the period 1926-2014.

The authors find that returns are generally higher during the period and that the effect is considerably stronger for small-firm portfolios relative to large capitalization portfolios. The authors also provide convincing evidence that the three most important trading days (especially for small stock portfolios) are the last trading day in December and the first two trading days in January.

The authors only check the markets in the USA. Market makers can use this to get significantly high returns during the Christmas-New Year period. The study shows for the first time that there is a size effect as part of the Santa Claus Rally.

This is the first study to show that Santa Claus Rally exists for a long time in the USA. It is the first study to show that there is a size effect in Santa Claus Rally. Market participants could get significantly higher returns by investing or being invested in the stock market during this period.

The impact of the holiday season on stock market returns.

This is the first major academic study to examine Santa Claus Rally in this much detail. The authors not only show that the rally exists, the authors show that it is based on firm size and has been in existence for nearly 90 years in the USA.

Dynamic lot sizing is the problem of determining the quantity and timing of ordering items while satisfying the demand over a finite planning horizon. This paper considers the problem with two practical considerations: minimum order size and lost sales. The minimum order size is the minimum amount of items that should be purchased and lost sales involve situations in which sales are lost because items are not on hand or when it becomes more economical to lose the sale rather than making the sale. The objective is to minimize the costs of ordering, item , inventory holding and lost sale over the planning horizon. To solve the problem, we suggest a heuristic algorithm by considering trade-offs between cost factors. Computational experiments on randomly generated test instances show that the algorithm quickly obtains near-optimal solutions.

An Act to consolidate certain enactments relating to contracts of employment. [27th July 1972]

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which outliers have persisted in augmenting the Halloween effect over time and to offer an econometric test of seasonality in return skewness that might provide a partial explanation for the Halloween effect.

The authors split the Morgan Stanley Capital International data for 37 countries into two subperiods and, using median regression and influence vectors, examine these periods for a possible change in the interplay between outliers and the Halloween effect. The authors perform a statistical assessment of whether outliers are a significant contributor to the overall Halloween effect using a bootstrap test of seasonal differences in return skewness.

Large returns (positive and negative) persist in being generally favorable to the Halloween effect in most countries. The authors find seasonality in return skewness to be statistically significant in many countries. Returns over the May through October timeframe are negatively skewed relative to returns over the November through April period.

This paper offers the first statistical test of seasonality in return skewness in the context of the Halloween effect. The authors show the Halloween effect to be a more complex phenomenon than the simple seasonality in mean returns documented in prior research.

The network capacity deployed to manage the busy hour (or peak-hour) traffic remains underused during the nonbusy (off-peak) hours. Transferring some traffic from peak-hour to off-peak hours is likely to improve the utilization of network resources during the off-peak hours. This paper aims to examine whether diverting traffic from peak-hour to off-peak hours is possible by adopting the differential pricing policy.

The peak-load pricing theory suggests that the policy of differential pricing is socially optimal when there is peak demand for a particular duration and then there is off-peak demand. In this study, hourly traffic data from both peak and off-peak periods were collected from the Indian telecom service provider, “Aircel.” The paper analyzed the disparity in traffic between peak and off-peak hours using the nonparametric Tukey’s test. An experiment was also conducted to analyze whether a significant shift in telecom traffic occurs from the peak to the off-peak period when a price discount is applied during the off-peak period.

Statistically significant differences were observed in network traffic between peak-hour and off-peak hours. The network utilization of the telecom service provider Aircel was notably lower, particularly during the off-peak hours. The experiment demonstrated a high degree of price sensitivity among telecom service subscribers. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has not considered network utilization of telecom service providers as a key performance indicator. Based on the outcomes of the study, this paper recommends that TRAI should adopt a more proactive approach by encouraging telecom service providers to follow the policy of differential pricing to enhance utilization of their network capacity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to explore the issue of pricing as a tool for bringing about more uniform movement of telecom traffic, thereby enhancing network utilization within India’s telecommunications sector.