This paper examines the link between intellectual property rights and world trade. To proxy for intellectual property rights, the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is used. An augmented gravity model incorporating 178 countries and over 14 years of observations is employed to tease out the effect of TRIPS on international trade. While previous studies have looked at GATT/WTO membership and its effect on trade, little research has investigated empirically the role that TRIPS plays on international trade. Here, we find that adherence to TRIPS reduces international trade. This result holds for cases where both trade partners are members of TRIPS and for cases where only one trade partner is a member.

This study investigates the impacts of financial intermediaries and stock markets on economic growth for 49 countries from 1960 to 2004. Results show that the stock market exhibits significantly positive effects on economic growth. In contrast, financial intermediary displays significantly varying effects on economic growth. Financial intermediaries accelerate economic growth at low levels of financial intermediary development but mitigate economic growth at high levels. Over-heated financial development may impede and even impair real economic growth rather than accelerate it. Therefore, governments may need to formulate policies to alleviate over-heated financial development in order to ensure a sound financial environment and thus steady economic growth.

This paper focuses on the investment methods parent companies use to form joint ventures (JVs) and investigates the relationship between those investment methods and JV stability. This study finds that factors such as parents' percentage ownership of JVs and their duration of ownership in JVs vary with investment method. This study also finds that JV terminations differ with investment methods. This suggests that investment methods affect JV stability. Third, the study finds that when one parent contributes financial capital and another parent contributes assets to a JV in the same industry, the parent that contributes the financial capital is more likely to acquire the JV later. In addition, parent companies owning more than 50% of their JVs tend to acquire 100% of those JVs regardless of investment method.

Customer retention is very crucial to the continuous survival of retail banking anywhere in the world, most especially when the deregulation of the sector has provided the customers with different choices to satisfy their financial needs. This has made many banks to pursue different strategies that will increase their customer satisfaction through enhanced service quality. This study examined the determinants of retail bank customer satisfaction in New Zealand through the survey of their perception about the banks service quality. The five dimensions of service quality were initially analysed in relation to customer satisfaction using the structural equation modeling technique but three were eventually used. The three factors specified to determine customer satisfaction in retail banking were found to be both practically and statistically significant. The implication is that the core, the enabling and the relational aspect of service quality must be taken care of by the banks to satisfy their customers in order to retain their loyalty.

This study tracks the nonparametric X-efficiency based measures and compares the efficiency dynamics of conventional and Islamic Kuwaiti banks over the period 1996-2010. The findings show that, in terms of all efficiency measures, Kuwaiti banks kept losing efficiency: a trend that started in 2004 and worsened after the 2008 economic crisis. However, two efficiency stages can be noted: The first trend is indicated for the period 1996-2003, during which conventional banks had clear efficiency superiority over Islamic banks. The second trend, from 2004 until 2010, shows Islamic banks having superiority over conventional banks. This superiority of Islamic banks was mainly due to the loss of efficiency in conventional banks and not to any gained efficiency in Islamic banks

This paper examines whether conditional skewness of returns at the market level is predictable and investigates the economic mechanisms underlying this predictability. We analyze aggregate market returns in 57 countries. Lagged one month returns predict conditional skewness of daily returns during the following month. Returns are more negatively skewed following an increase in stock prices and returns are more positively skewed following a decrease in stock prices. This relation between skewness and lagged returns is economically and statistically strong across both developed and emerging countries. We are able to distinguish different theories by testing positive lagged return and negative lagged returns predictability of skewness and volatility separately and testing predictability of adjusted-trend turnover interaction with short-sale constraint data from Charoenrook and Daouk (2003). The evidence shows that the traditional explanations of skewness such as the leverage effect, the volatility feedback effect, the stock bubble model (Blanchard and Watson, 1982), and the fluctuating uncertainty theory (Veronesi, 1999) exist in the data but are not the only economic mechanisms driving the asymmetry in stock returns. We find no evidence of Hong and Stein (2003). Our results are consistent with Coval, Coval and Hirshleifer (2002). Our findings have implications for future theoretical and empirical models of time-varying market return distributions, optimal asset allocation, and risk management.