Political observers predicted the Ukraine invasion by Russia for many days, but they could not precisely anticipate the scheme and timing of the invasion. This paper investigates the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the global commodity and stock markets using an event study methodology. The empirical results of this study suggest that this invasion unevenly affected the financial markets. More precisely, our results suggest that the onset of war has put pressure on global gold and stock markets. Furthermore, it seems that the only asset that could be considered a safe haven for investors after the outbreak of the invasion was oil.

This paper investigates the impact of board diversity on the performance and riskiness of banks across Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. We emphasize identifying features of the board structure that could increase performance and lower the possible losses of banks. Using a unique, hand-collected dataset of 156 banks from CEE countries during 2005-2012, we assess whether banks with more female directors or chairwomen display lower risk and higher performance. The analysis first shows that banks with a chairwoman and a higher proportion of females among the members of a bank's board record a higher level of profitability and tend to have a lower level of credit losses. Additionally, the results suggest that the higher proportion of females among members on bank boards, on average, the higher the level of bank stability during the financial crisis of 2008. Our results also reveal that the regulatory framework in the host-country affects the relationship between board gender diversity and bank performance and risk.

In this paper, we follow Anderson et al. (2009) and suggest a simple approach to employ a set of financial ratios as inputs to estimate an aggregate bankruptcy index (ABI). This index is a within sample measure, ranges between 0 and 1, and ranks the firms on the basis of their relative financial distress. ABI can be used to predict the propensity of financial failure and corporate bankruptcy. For the purpose of comparison and assessment of the robustness of this index, we estimate Z-score by multivariate discriminant analysis, using the same set of financial ratios to compare the predictive accuracy of two approaches. We find that, to some extent, ABI can predict the bankruptcy of the firms more accurately than Z-score. The empirical results of the paper suggest that ABI has relatively robust predictive power and, therefore, can be applied together with other, based on parametric and non-parametric models to predict corporate bankruptcy.

This paper examines the reactions of investors to the arrival of unexpected information in five major US equity markets from 1990 to 2001, a period characterized by high daily trading volume and the increasing presence of noise-traders. Market surprises are identified using a strictly quantitative approach, cumulative abnormal returns are calculated and tracked for a period of 30 days after each favourable or unfavourable event. The empirical results provide evidence that investors’ reactions during the sample period are consistent with the prediction of the Uncertain Information Hypothesis in all markets except NASDAQ. One major implication of these results for investors is that implementing a contrarian strategy of buying current losers and selling current winners will not generate superior returns.