Evolving Market Efficiency with an Application to Some Bulgarian Shares

With new technically advanced methods and computers at our disposal, the efficient market hypothesis is once again being debated. At the same time, we are witnessing an unprecedented growth in both existing and new financial markets. These new markets are often in economies which have just recently embraced free market economics; we term these stock markets infant markets. Such stock markets are obviously not efficient in allocating the supply of savings to productive capital. We do not test whether or not these infant markets are informationally efficient, but instead examine whether and how they are becoming more efficient. We propose modelling the excess returns of individual securities using a multi-factor model with time-varying coefficients and generalised auto-regressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) errors. If the markets are becoming more informationally efficient or the agents are learning, we would expect this to manifest itself as the time-varying coefficients becoming more stable as time increases. We test our model using data on four Bulgarian shares. First, we estimate an AR(2) model and a GARCH-M(1,1) model for the shares. Then, we estimated our AR(2) model with time varying coefficients and GARCH type errors. We find varying levels of efficiency and varying speeds of movement towards efficiency within our sample of four shares.     

Intractable Conflict from the Bottom Up

Negotiation Journal -     

Preventing Dysfunction and Improving Policy Advice: The Role of Intra‐Departmental Boundary Spanners

It is well established in the public management literature that boundary spanners – people or groups that work across departments or sectors – are critical to the success of whole of government and joined‐up working. In studying recent unprecedented change to central government agencies in the Australian context, our research identified that intra‐departmental boundary spanners also play a critical role in the functioning of government departments, particularly during restructuring. Although most contemporary literature in public management concentrates on boundaries across formal organisational entities (departments, agencies, sectors), boundaries also exist within departments. Our research has found that without dedicated intra‐departmental boundary spanners, significant role confusion and dysfunctional practices arise. In turn, this has serious implications for the quality of policy advice given to Cabinet. Further research needs to be undertaken into both the role of intra‐departmental boundary spanners and how to nurture and manage the practice of intra‐departmental boundary spanners. This is especially the case if changes in Australia represent a fundamental shift more broadly in the way central government agencies operate.     

Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.