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Nonperforming assets in any banking system have stressed the economic health of nations. Resultantly, literature has given considerable impetus to predict failures and bankruptcy. Past studies have focused on the outcome of failures, while, there is a dearth of studies focusing on ongoing firms in bad shape. We plug this gap and attempt to identify underlying communication patterns for firms witnessing prolonged underperformance. Using text mining, we extract and analyze semantic, linguistic, emotional, and sentiment-based features in non-numeric communication channels of these poor-performing firms and their peers. These uncovered patterns highlight the use of vocabulary and tone of communication, in correspondence to their financial well-being. Furthermore, using such patterns, we deploy various Machine Learning algorithms to identify loser firm(s) way ahead in time. We observe promising accuracy over a time window of five years. Such early warning signals can be of critical importance to various stakeholders of a firm. Exploration of writing style-related features for any firm would help its investors, lending agencies to assess the likelihood of future underperformance. Firm management can use them to take suitable precautionary measures and preempt the future possibility of distress. While investors and lenders can be benefitted from this incremental information to identify the likelihood of future failures.

This chapter challenges a commonly accepted view such that the increase in monetary supply aiming to lower the market rate and/or aiming to ease liquidity conditions would encourage the banks as financial intermediaries or the investors as fund providers to provide more funds, which results in stimulating the macro-economy. This chapter suggests that there is no clear-cut mechanism in the economic theory for underpinning the commonly accepted view upon which the Quantitative Easing policy is based. This theoretical analysis suggests that there may exist an appropriate level of market reference rate, which can encourage the investors to absorb the relatively wider range of credit risk in the bond market. Extremely higher market rate would discourage the borrowers to raise funds, while lower market rate would drain “risk” funds in the bond market. In this context, the appropriate level of market rate may stand on a narrow range of the kind of “knife-edge,” though the level per se does not always guarantee the optimal allocation of financial resources.

The authors believe the COVID-19 pandemic has an impact on supply and demand. The potential decline in real sector performance leads to lower expectations of securities performance. The uncertainty of future performance can change investor behaviour. This study tried to gain insight into stock investor behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results showed that the majority of the investor realized and believed the pandemic would affect the stock market performance. Hence, they did not show herding behaviour and were very confident during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey also indicates that investors tend to avoid risk rather than take the opportunity to buy at a lower price. Moreover, investors believe that the COVID-19 vaccine will soon be found, and the economy will return to normal. Government and self-regulated organizations (SRO) are responsible for making effective policies to convince the investors about the future prospect.

At the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2007–2008, majority of the analysts and policymakers have anticipated contagion from the markets volatility in the advanced economies (AEs) to the emerging markets (EMs). This chapter examines the volatility spillovers from the AEs’ equity markets (Japan, the United States and Europe) to the four key EMs, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

The period under study, from 2000 through mid-2014, reflects a time of varying regimes in markets volatility, including the periods of dot.com bubble, the Global Financial Crisis and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, the Great Recession and the start of the Russian-Ukrainian geopolitical crisis. To estimate volatility cross-linkages between the AEs and BRIC markets, we use multivariate GARCH-BEKK model across a number of specifications.

We find that, the developed economies weighted return volatility did have a significant impact on volatility across all four of the BRIC economies returns. However, contrary to the consensus view, there was no evidence of volatility spillover from the individual AEs onto BRIC economies with the exception of a spillover from Europe to Brazil. The implied forward-looking expectations for markets volatility had a strong and significant spillover effect onto Brazil, Russia and China, and a weaker effect on India.

The evidence on volatility spillovers from the AEs markets to EMs puts into question the traditional view of financial and economic systems sustainability in the presence of higher orders of integration of the global monetary and financial systems. Overall, data suggest that we are witnessing less than perfect integration between BRIC economies and AEs markets to-date can offer some volatility hedging opportunities for investors.

Our chapter contributes to the growing literature on volatility spillovers from the AEs to the EMs in a number of ways. Firstly, we provide a formal analysis of the spillovers to the BRIC economies over the periods of recent crises. Secondly, we make new conclusions concerning longer-term spillovers as opposed to higher frequency volatility contagion covered by the previous literature. Thirdly, we consider a new channel for volatility contagion – the trade-weighted AEs volatility measure.

In this postscript, I argue that a sociological approach to regulating securities markets requires a clear stance on the relationship between price and value, one that combines (a) the contrarian thesis that there are objective criteria by which one can assess value more accurately than the current market price; (b) the constructionist thesis that prices are governed by commonly known beliefs that can vary substantially from the objective reality they purport to reflect; and (c) the realist thesis that the market comprises powerful mechanisms (arbitrage and learning) that, when working properly, close the gap between the contrarian's private belief and common knowledge, thus producing reasonable prices. This integrated “rationalist” perspective understands the real estate bubble as the product of institutional conditions that fostered pluralistic ignorance regarding the extent of bearish sentiment. Regulatory prescriptions focus on support for transparent pricing and a relative evenhandedness in the institutional support provided for bulls/optimists and bears/pessimists.

The focus of this chapter is the intersection of social media, publication, data sharing, and research ethics. By now there is an extensive literature on the use of social media in research. There is also excellent work on challenges of postpublication sharing of social media, primarily focused on legal restrictions, technical infrastructure, and documentation. This chapter attempts to build upon and extend this work by using cases to deepen the analysis of ethical issues arising from publishing and sharing social media data. Publishing will refer to the presentation of data extracts, aggregations, or summaries, while sharing refers to the practice of making the underlying data available postpublication for others to use. It will look at the ethical questions that arise both for researchers (or others) sharing data, and those who are using data that has been made available by others, emphasizing the inherently relational nature of data sharing. The ethical challenges researchers face when considering sharing user-generated content collected from social media platforms are the focus of the cases. The chapter begins by summarizing the general principles of research ethics, then identifies the specific ethical challenges from sharing social media data and positions these challenges in the context of these general principles. These challenges are then analyzed in more detail with cases from research projects that drew upon several different genres of social media. The chapter concludes with some recommendations for practical guidance and considers the future of ethical practice in sharing social media data.

This article examinees how vulnerability operates within the intimate economy in Hong Kong’s prominent entertainment district of Wanchai. Best known in its portrayal of The World of Suzie Wong, Wanchai’s historicity is anchored in a legacy of colonialism, orientalist imagination, and Western militarization. Presently, the area continues to cater to Western expatriate men, foreign travellers and the US Navy. An influx of Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers to Hong Kong in recent decades has led to the rise of new intimate relationships fostered in the bar district. While Wanchai is renowned as a red-light district celebrating white Western masculinity, a complex portrait emerged after a year of ethnographic fieldwork observing the intimate exchanges between Western expatriate men and Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, as two groups who are positioned on opposite ends of the city’s socioeconomic spectrum. Contrary to recurrent portrayals of female victimhood in commercialized sex industries, this article illustrates how other experiences of vulnerability, particularly those of the Western male expatriate partner, also deserve critical attention. By exploring the decommercialized transactions within Wanchai’s intimate economy, this piece demonstrates how the intimate relations forged between Western expatriates and Southeast Asian migrants can help negotiate longstanding gendered relations of power and shared senses of structural precarity.

American depository receipts (ADRs) listed on the New York Stock Exchange during the 1990s and 2000s are compared to determine how well they performed versus the US index and respective regional indexes utilizing three-year holding period excess returns. Results suggest that ADRs listed in the 2000s perform better than those in the 1990s. Also, seasoned equity offerings performed better than initial public offerings. Regression analysis indicated the best predictors of ADR performance are the returns of the respective regional index where the ADR-listing firm is headquartered, the date of issue (2000s vs 1990s), and whether the ADR was from an emerging economy.