The expansion of investment strategies and capital markets is altering the significance and empirical rationality of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The vitality of capital markets is essential for efficiency research. The authors explore here the development and contemporary status of the efficient market hypothesis by emphasizing anomaly/excess returns. Investors often fail to get excess returns; however, thus far, market anomalies have been witnessed and stock prices have diverged from their intrinsic value. This paper presents an analysis of anomaly returns in the presence of the theory of the efficient market. Moreover, the market efficiency progression is reviewed and its present status is explored. Finally, the authors provide enough evidence of a data snooping issue, which violates and challenges the existing proof and creates room for replication studies in modern finance.

Literature on the fiscal incentives highlight the importance of how the design of intergovernmental transfer system has momentous implication on the local government’s behavior within devolved systems. The pragmatic results on the relationship between IGT and the incentive creation for the local government revenue generation are indecisive and differs across countries. Using a unique data set covering public finance and various socio economic data over the period 1990 to 2015 in Pakistan, this paper contribute to fiscal federalism literature by evaluating the fiscal incentives of unconditional (general purpose) formula defined and conditional (specific purpose) ad hoc based transfers. After endogenity adjustments, our empirical results shows that unconditional formula based intergovernmental transfers/grants improve the mobilization of local government revenues while the conditional, ad hoc based transfers, deteriorate the mobilization of local revenue. However, in Pakistan large part of transfers are unconditional so the results suggest that transfers from the federal government complement local own source revenues generation by encouraging local governments in Pakistan to collect more revenues.

This study examines the impact of regulatory capital requirements and ownership structure on bank lending in Emerging Asian Markets. The findings of the study imply that banks with excess capital are less affected by capital constraints and enjoy opportunities to extend their credit portfolios. The monitory policy indicator has the expected negative and significant impact on bank lending. In case of well-capitalized banks, the interaction between the excess capital and monetary policy indicator has a significant positive relation with bank lending, which means that banks with excess capital have capability to raise uninsured financing and shield their loan portfolios as compared to less-capitalized banks that reduce their lending in the period of monetary tightening. In the case of bank ownership structure, banks with excess capital ratios and ownership concentration lead towards an increase in lending activity. The findings also show that well-capitalized banks with managerial ownership tend to reduce lending which validates agency theory of corporate governance.