This paper proposes a probit approach to measure and forecast extreme downside risks in Asian Pacific markets given information on extreme negative shocks in the U.S. and Japanese markets. The extreme downside risk of a market is measured as the occurrence of market returns falling below left-tail Value at Risk in a Markov switching framework. The empirical findings are consistent with the following notions. First, extreme downside movements of the S&P 500 and Nikkei 225 are significantly predictive for extreme downside movements in all of the investigated Asian-Pacific markets. Second, the majority of Asian-Pacific markets become more sensitive to the Japan's extreme negative shocks when the Japanese market switches into turbulent periods, whereas the U.S. spillover effect is enhanced only on Taiwan during the U.S. turbulent periods. Third, mainland China is overall the least affected by the extreme negative shocks in the United States and Japan, while Australia is the most sensitive to the United States and Singapore is the most vulnerable to Japan.

This paper investigates the nature of information leadership of the U.S. and Japan in the advanced Asia-Pacific stock markets. Instead of just relying on return and return volatility spillovers from major markets, specific and disaggregated news events are also utilized. In particular, the aim is to examine the nature of spillover effects of scheduled announcements of the U.S. and Japanese macroeconomic variables in the advanced Asia-Pacific stock markets of Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore for the period 2 January 1991 to 31 May 1999. The investigation reveals that both U.S. and Japanese announcement news elicit significant first and second moment influences on the returns of the other markets, in general, and that there is a complex array of significant market responses to various news announcements. There is also strong evidence of markets responding differently to bad news announcements compared to overall news (including both good and bad news) announcements which indicate that the information content of each economic announcement is a source of tradable information rather than the act of releasing economic figures. Thus, this paper contributes to the literature by shedding light on the important drivers of the documented information leadership of the U.S. and Japanese stock markets.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was reported in China in December 2019, and later spread to other parts of the world. Countries in Southeast Asia were some of the first nations affected by the pandemic due to their geographical proximities and trade relations with China. In January 2020, the virus spread to some countries within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The number of confirmed cases kept increasing within ASEAN and other countries of the world. Consequently, countries in ASEAN introduced preventive and containment measures to cope with the pandemic, which include quarantines, lockdowns, restrictions of movements and large gatherings, as well as school and business closures.Beyond the efforts of preventing and containing the spread of the virus, ASEAN's most significant challenges are the social and economic crisis of historic proportions that are beginning to unfold. COVID-19 pandemic has brought interruptions in all sectors of ASEAN economies. It is, therefore, imperative to assess the extent to which the pandemic has impacted the social and economic aspects of the region. This book intends to highlight the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in ASEAN and suggest ways on how to mitigate them. It covers how the shocks from COVID-19 have impacted production, supply chains, demand, commodity prices, consumer behaviour, financial markets, employment, services, transportation and community, and the various policies that ASEAN authorities should put in place to mitigate the effects of the pandemic.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.

This book studies the information spillover among financial markets and explores the intraday effect and ACD models with high frequency data. This book also contributes theoretically by providing a new statistical methodology with comparative advantages for analyzing comovements between two time series. It explores this new method by testing the information spillover between the Chinese stock market and the international market, futures market and spot market. Using the high frequency data, this book investigates the intraday effect and examines which type of ACD model is particularly suited in capturing financial duration dynamics. The book will be of invaluable use to scholars and graduate students interested in comovements among different financial markets and financial market microstructure and to investors and regulation departments looking to improve their risk management.

We investigate how corporate stock returns respond to geopolitical risk in the case of South Korea, which has experienced large and unpredictable geopolitical swings that originate from North Korea. To do so, a monthly index of geopolitical risk from North Korea (the GPRNK index) is constructed using automated keyword searches in South Korean media. The GPRNK index, designed to capture both upside and downside risk, corroborates that geopolitical risk sharply increases with the occurrence of nuclear tests, missile launches, or military confrontations, and decreases significantly around the times of summit meetings or multilateral talks. Using firm-level data, we find that heightened geopolitical risk reduces stock returns, and that the reductions in stock returns are greater especially for large firms, firms with a higher share of domestic investors, and for firms with a higher ratio of fixed assets to total assets. These results suggest that international portfolio diversification and investment irreversibility are important channels through which geopolitical risk affects stock returns.