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The purpose of this paper is to obtain new empirical evidence about the connections between equity trading activity and five possible liquidity determinants: market capitalisation, dividend yield, earnings yield, company growth and the distinction between recently listed firms as opposed to more established ones.

The authors use a sample of 172 stocks from four European markets and estimate models using the entire sample data and different sub-samples to check the relative importance of the above determinants. The authors also conduct a factor analysis to re-classify the variables into a more succinct framework.

The evidence suggests that market capitalisation is the most important trading activity determinant, and the number of years listed ranks thereafter.

The positive relation between trading activity and market capitalisation is in line with prior literature, while the findings relating to the other determinants offer further empirical evidence which is a worthy addition in view of the contradictory results in prior research.

This study is of relevance to practitioners who would like to understand the cross-sectional variation in stock liquidity at a more detailed level.

The originality of the paper rests on two important grounds: the authors focus on trading turnover rather than on other liquidity proxies, since the former is accepted as an important determinant of the liquidity-generation process, and the authors adopt a rigorous approach towards checking the robustness of the results by considering various sub-sample configurations.

This paper examines whether there are differences in the nature of the price discovery process across established versus emerging stock markets using a twenty-country sample.

The authors analyse security returns for traces of predictability or non-randomness using variance ratio tests, Granger-Causality models and runs tests.

The findings pinpoint at predictabilities which seem inconsistent with market efficiency, and they suggest that the inherent cause of predictability differs across groups.

The authors present empirical evidence which may be used to attain a deeper understanding of the links between predictability and market efficiency, in view of the conflicting evidence in prior literature.

Whilst the pricing process in emerging markets may be hindered by delayed adjustments, in case of established markets it seems that there is a higher tendency for price reversals which could be due to prior over-reactions.

This study presents evidence of substantial differences in predictability across developed and emerging markets which was gleaned through the rigorous application of different empirical tests.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the share price volatility of Mediterranean banks and their dividend policies, with particular emphasis on the variation of results across sub-samples and the outcomes when omitting outlier observations.

The authors use dividend yield and dividend payout as proxies of dividend policy, and regress these ratios together with other control variables to model volatility. The robustness of the results is assessed by re-using a data set which omits the outliers relating to the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis and by forming sub-samples using cluster analysis.

The results show that the elimination of outliers and the setting up of sub-samples lead to different inferences about the underlying relationship between dividend policy and volatility. In addition traditional indicators of statistical significance may give the impression of a robust relationship, when this may not be the case.

The paper offers insights to stock traders and corporate managers in terms of better understanding the effect of dividend policies on share price volatility and its related risks and opportunities.

The study presents noteworthy empirical evidence in terms of its rigorous approach towards checking the robustness of results.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate whether call auctions which batch orders for simultaneous execution, may restrain stock market volatility.

The authors use high-frequency data to investigate volatility changes following the suspension of opening and closing call auctions on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India in 1999. The authors evaluate this issue by considering both modelled and realised volatility. Using a GARCH approach the authors model intra-day volatility for the trading days preceding and succeeding the auction suspension. The authors also scrutinise return distributions to look for volatility changes during different parts of the day.

When interpreted collectively, the empirical results suggest that the auction suspension was followed by reduced volatility particularly in the middle of the trading day and at the closing.

Given that auctions are often incorporated in trading systems with the aim of curtailing volatility, the main conclusion, that the auction suspension was followed by lower volatility, has important practical inferences. Auctions cannot be automatically relied on to reduce volatility. The intricacies of the auction protocol and their interaction with ancillary market microstructure features may impact on auction efficacy.

The paper adopts a novel approach towards assessing the effectiveness of auctions by considering an unusual occurrence of an auction suspension. The empirical setting enables a clear comparison of the respective regimes since these periods do not materially differ in other subsidiary aspects. This is a noteworthy factor, since the empirical contexts considered in prior studies, often feature several simultaneous changes.

The main objective of this study is to obtain new empirical evidence on non-synchronous trading effects through modelling the predictability of market indices.

The authors test for lead-lag effects between the Indian Nifty and Nifty Junior indices using Pesaran–Timmermann tests and Granger-Causality. Then, a simple test on overnight returns is proposed to infer whether the observed predictability is mainly attributable to non-synchronous trading or some form of inefficiency.

The evidence suggests that non-synchronous trading is a better explanation for the observed predictability in the Indian Stock Market.

The indication that non-synchronous trading effects become more pronounced in high-frequency data suggests that prior studies using daily data may underestimate the impacts of non-synchronicity.

The originality of the paper rests on various important contributions: overnight returns is looked at to infer whether predictability is more attributable to non-synchronous trading or to some form of inefficiency; the impacts of non-synchronicity are investigated in terms of lead-lag effects rather than serial correlation; and high-frequency data is used which gauges the impacts of non-synchronicity during less active parts of the trading day.

This chapter analyses the politics of bird hunting in relation to the empowerment of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) in the European Union (EU), with specific reference to Malta’s first years of EU accession.

In particular, the analysis focuses on the activism of Maltese and International ENGOs – with special focus on Birdlife Malta and Birdlife International – on this issue, which is characterized by extensive EU legislation and by constant lobbying.

This chapter argues that ENGOs, both Maltese and European, were influential on State power in Malta, especially by resorting to the EU, and also being given prominence by the media. Yet the hunting lobby was influential too, and its influence on Malta’s main political parties is an overdetermining factor, which remained in place even after EU accession.

This chapter concludes that despite Malta’s EU accession, national political factors remain highly influential in the Maltese hunting issue, and that one can expect more antagonism in the years to come.

Considering the ongoing international debate on the role of public administrations in economic systems, the interest around public service motivation (PSM) has significantly grown among practitioners and scholars in the past two decades. Following the research streams that have investigated topics of organizational behavior within the public context, the purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of PSM on public employees’ feelings of job satisfaction. The novelty of the study lies in linking some characteristics of the work context presumed to be more prevalent in public organizations with specific job characteristics, regarded as relevant antecedents of job satisfaction.

The study is based on two complementary studies conducted in an Italian public administration. The paper shows how PSM influences job satisfaction, job engagement, and life satisfaction.

This paper shows how PSM influences job satisfaction, job engagement, and life satisfaction. The findings display how job engagement affects both job and life satisfaction in such contexts. Additionally, the findings display how job engagement affects both job and life satisfaction in such contexts.

Although based on a specific context of public administration, the analysis allows some generalizations.

Based on these results, the paper contributes to two main streams of the literature. First, it enriches the existing research on PSM by analyzing how it can be managed in complex organizations. Second, it informs the literature on job satisfaction and work-related stress and relates to the intersection between organizational behavior and human resource management that informs the drawing up of HR policies. Furthermore, the paper sheds new light on how to deal with such problems and at the same time opens new avenues for investigations.