This dissertation consists of three essays that address recent developments in international financial markets that have been of concern for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. The first essay examines how cultural factors can influence individual investors' trading behavior in response to risk in nine Eurozone countries. The markets studied were particularly affected by the global financial crisis, the subsequent European banking crisis, and the European sovereign debt crisis. Using mutual fund flows as proxy of investors' trading behavior, our evidence indicates that a country culture variable significantly affects investors' trading responsiveness to risk. Specifically, the impact of risk on fund flows is significantly positive and is larger in scale in countries with individualist cultures. The second essay attempts to investigate the effects of negative interest rate policies (NIRP) on foreign exchange and equity markets of eight European countries and Japan. To see the impacts of these policies, event studies and regime-switching vector autoregressive regression analyses are conducted for the nine countries that implement NIRP. The results provide valid evidence that the announcement of NIRP has a transitory effect on currency depreciation; long term effects are less evident. On the day of NIRP implementation, both currency and equity market returns reacted in response to the event efficiently and negatively, especially in Switzerland's case. These outcomes suggest that simulative monetary policy by lowering interest rates below zero might have counter-effects from those observed when interest rates are lowered, but to rates that remain positive. Additionally, findings from the long term analyses explain that interest rate term structure and cointegration level of local and the U.S. equity index may be related to effectiveness of NIRP in currency and equity markets, respectively. The last essay examines the determinants of the price of the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. The analyses identify a number of factors that significantly affect the returns to investments in Bitcoin including: trading volume, high-low price spread, and extreme price change in the previous period. The latter result supports the assertion that recent severe price fluctuations in Bitcoin markets are primarily due to speculative investment activities. Furthermore, evidences suggested in this study explain possibility of market compromise and inefficiency of the cryptocurrency market, implying pivotal risks for Bitcoin market participants.

This paper contains essays on sterilized intervention, on covered interest rate parity, and on chartist analysis in financial markets. Each essay contains a definition, brief survey of the empirical evidence and overall assessment of each topic.

This dissertation consists of three essays that address recent topics in financial markets that concern for scholars, policymakers, and investors. The first essay examines the benefits of international diversification for US investors, while accounting for market development, corporate governance, market cap effects, and structural change across countries over period August 1996 -July 2013. Improved risk adjusted returns are obtained from a diversified portfolio consisting of a mix of developed and emerging countries. Additionally, we find that diversification benefits are not significant for most of the small-cap foreign assets when an investor already holds position in corresponding countries large-cap assets. Diversification benefits based on the governance effectiveness of a country's companies are not ubiquitous. We find that economically significant improvements in risk-return performance can be attained by adding large caps of developed countries with high and low overall Governance Metrics International (GMI) ratings and large and small caps of emerging countries with low overall GMI ratings to the investment universe containing the assets of common law developed countries. However, diversification benefits are economically significant only for large and small caps of low GMI emerging countries when short selling is not allowed. The second essay looks at the market impact of recent regulatory changes in Canada that provide for trading halts on individual stocks that experience large upside or downside movements. The focus is on all stocks traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange since the inception of the single stock circuit breaker rule (SSCB) in February 2012, to replace the short-sale uptick rule. The results support pricing efficiency: material information that caused the circuit breaker is incorporated in stock prices on the day of the halt (neither overreaction nor underreaction), with no decline in market liquidity. Using trade-by-trade data constructed on 5-minute trading intervals, we refine the daily results, and show that shocks in realized volatility are focused in the ten-minute trading interval surrounding the halts. While circuit breakers provide a limited "safety net" for investors when their stocks are subject to severe volatility, they do not provide for a quick turnaround for stocks experiencing severe price decline events. The last essay re-examines the historical vs implied volatility spread anomaly, reported by Goyal and Saretto (2009) using a second-order stochastic dominance (SSD) criterion. The approach incorporates transaction frictions, and is robust to model specification problems, return distributions, as well as preferences. It is found that option trading frictions such as cash collateral requirements and option trading costs significantly reduce but do not eliminate returns to a long-short straddle trading strategy pre-2006 period. However, the anomaly disappears after 2006, consistent with market efficiency. The SSD test results confirm the findings.