This book is on the pricing of sovereign debt in 17 bond markets across Asia: from Japan in the Far East and Israel in West Asia. The 17 markets include the very large bond market of Japan, which ranks equal among the largest five markets namely in the UK, the USA, Germany and Switzerland. Sovereign debt overhang is allegedly destabilizing the world economy from October 2011, since when the then Eurozone crisis transformed into government debt overhang crisis. This book is about the economics of how the sovereign debts are rated, priced and sold on the basis of perceived risk by investors buying and selling debt instruments. Developed economies' debt burden as a percentage of national income has risen over 25 years from about 40 percent of GDP to the current figure of about 80 percent largely as a result of profligate government spending. So governments are now overhung with loans. One aim of this book is to highlight the sovereign debts of some 17 important economies in Asia, happily none of them seriously as sick as the ones in EU. One clear lesson from this research effort is that the bond markets are quite clever in pricing different risk levels of sovereign debts in Asian countries.

This book identifies how the major and some minor bond markets reacted to interest rate increases and decreases over the recent few years. As every investor knows excessive borrowings relative to the ability to service loans constitute sovereign debt crisis, and it is not limited only to developing countries as shown by the fall in bond values of profligate borrowers such as the Greece. This book is on the pricing of sovereign debt in 17 bond markets across the developed world, ones that have received most of the investors' money as investments.

This paper reports evidence of significant abnormal returns in call and put options in the New York Stock Exchange around the disclosure time of two equity funding events. The delta values as risk of options are used to adjust gross returns of calls and puts to obtain adjusted abnormal returns. Theory suggests any stock price increases around private placement announcement dates would make calls to become in-the-money, so call prices should increase: conversely, puts would become out-of-money so put prices should be unaffected. Stock price declines around seasoned equity announcement dates would make put prices to increase since puts become in-the-money: call prices, having become out-of-money, would not change. Further, if the spot to the derivative market price impact is due to both markets being fully integrated, a trading strategy could yield profits. To test this, we apply cointegration and Granger-causality tests: we find there is no predictable spot-to-option-market integration in either direction. The empirical evidence of option price changes reported here and also evidence of no integration provide support for the idea that spot and option prices are being formed independently of each other, therefore prices are consistent with the efficient market hypothesis and the option pricing model.

This paper provides weak evidence in support for the application of Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) on the Iranian stock market in the Sharia is the sacred law of Islam faith.) based close economy. Tests conducted using the principal component analysis and canonical correlation model showed that at least one to three factors that can explain the cross-section of expected returns in this market. Financial and economical sanctions possibly explain the negative stock market returns which reflect the reaction of investors to the announcement of sanctions. Overall, the results suggest that there are four groups of macroeconomic variables in the test period that affect stock returns for the test period, 1991 to 2008, but the significance of these factors is not consistent over time. In general the findings document a weak applicability of APT in this market.