Global financial market has developed tremendously in the last two decades and has affected financial flows and the flow of international investments. With subdued global economic activities and generalized slowdown in emerging markets, countries need to manage vulnerabilities in the financial markets and rebuild resilience against potential shocks while lifting growth through the attraction of foreign investments. Sustainable macroeconomic policies must be in place coupled with financial stability to sustain global businesses. This paper examines the relations between financial market development and foreign direct investment (FDI) for the United States and Malaysia from 1981 to 2013. We divide financial market development into stock market and banking sector development. Our results show that higher stock market liquidity draws more FDI into the developed U.S., signifying higher foreign investors’ confidence and the importance of equity capital financing opportunities to foreign investors. In Malaysia, banking sector development has a significantly negative effect on FDI inflows, suggesting two possibilities: FDI is considered a substitute for financial development, or excess liquidity in the banking sector is perceived by foreign investors as having higher risk of financial fragility, hence results in lower FDI inflows.

This paper investigates empirically the optimal debt structure policy in relation to growth opportunities under Myers’s theoretical framework using hand-collected data sets of non-financial listed firms in Mongolia for the period from 2012 to 2018 controlling for the effects of variables including tangibility, firm size, liquidity and profitability. The empirical results regarding the debt structure of non-financial listed firms in Mongolia are consistent with Myers's theoretical framework and the trade-off theory where high growth firms prefer to borrow less. The contribution of this study is to provide empirical evidence on optimal debt structure of growth firms in Mongolia, a developing country with comparably smaller capital markets, to find out whether results differ to that of previous studies which were conducted on countries with developing as well as developed capital markets.

This study aims to examine (1) the strengths and weaknesses of the financial sector in terms of governance practices; and (2) the governance compliance level of the sector in Hong Kong. A rating instrument is designed to test four major governance areas: ‘Board Responsibilities’, ‘Disclosure and Transparency’, ‘Equitable Treatment of Shareholders’, and ‘Role of Stakeholders’. Results show that companies perform best in ‘Role of Stakeholders’ and worst in ‘Disclosure and Transparency’. The total corporate governance score of the sector has improved by almost twofold during 2003 to 2017. However, it is disappointing to see that most of the companies barely meet the merest requirements specified by the regulators; only a few of them allot resources to support good governance voluntarily. According to the literature review, this is the first over-a-decade-long longitudinal research to study the trends of the corporate governance performance of the financial sector.

This paper investigates the dynamic linkages among the equity markets of the US (proxied by S&P 500), Germany(proxied by DAX30 , France (proxied by CAC30), UK (proxied by FTSE100) and other 14 other major Eurozone markets ( proxied by STOXX 600) using daily stock series from March 3, 2010 through April 17, 2018. Data are collected from the Bloomberg Database and the econometric models are estimated applying the most recent version of Econometric software (EViews 11). Jarque-Bera statistic shows non-normal distribution of the series. Augmented Dicky Fuller test indicates nonstationarity in level series and stationary in first differenced series. Applying Johansen Cointegration technique the study finds that stock price indices of these countries have long-run (equilibium) relationship. Applying the Granger-causality test, strong unidirectional causality has been detected from the US to 16 European markets except for the UK. No causality has been found from the European markets to the US market, indicating that the US market is the leader and the Euro markets are the followers. This is not surprising given the robust US economic growth during the period of our study A strong unidirectional Granger causality has been detected from Germany to the France market with 1 through 5 days lag. A weak unidirectional Granger causality is found from the UK to other Eurozone markets, and from the French to the UK market. In the case of Europe, Frankfurt stock market strongly affects the Paris bourse as well as other Eurozone markets. This result is also not surprising given the high economic growth rates of Germany and French during the sample period and the unfavorable impact of Britain exit from the European Union (BREXIT).