This study examines the weak-form efficient market hypothesis (EMH) for the Finance Sector in Malaysian Stock Exchange, by exploring and scrutinizing the firm-level efficiency over for the period from 1st January 1997 to 31st December 2014. For this purpose, we apply panel nonlinear unit root test that accounts for heterogeneity, and panel stationarity test to allow for the presence of structural breaks and cross-sectional dependence (CSD). The main findings of this study suggest the following: first, there is a strong CSD among the price series of finance stocks; second, unlike the traditional panel unit root tests that provide mixed-results, the panel stationarity test which incorporates structural breaks and CSD suggests that these series are characterized as random walk processes implying the Finance Sector is weak-form efficient. The finding of weak-form efficiency has salient implications in terms of capital allocation, stock price predictability, forecasting technique, and the impact of shocks to stock prices

This paper tests the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis for a collection of ASEAN-5 countries using monthly data spanning the period 1968:1–2009:11. For this purpose, a number of recently developed more powerful panel unit root tests that permit for dependence among the individual countries are employed. In addition to this, we utilize the Lagrange multiplier (LM) cointegration test developed by Westerlund, which is flexible enough to accommodate a large degree of country specific heterogeneity, cross-country dependence as well as multiple structural breaks. The main results derived from this study are: first, our findings from panel unit root tests which do not control for cross-sectional dependence appear to be clearly showing evidence against PPP. Second, the evidence from panel tests controlling for cross-sectional dependence is against PPP over the whole and 1997 pre-financial crisis periods. On the other hand, we find sufficient evidence to support PPP for ASEAN-5 countries over the post-financial crisis period. Third, in stark contrast stand the results obtained from the application of the panel cointegration test provide strong evidence of panel cointegration in whole and sub-periods, providing evidence for PPP; however, these findings have become apparent after allowing for multiple structural breaks as well as for general forms of cross-sectional dependence through bootstrap methods. We provide a detailed description of the breaks identified in the analysis, which appear to be closely associated with some macroeconomic shocks and institutional arrangements. The findings of this study offer important policy implications.