Three Essays On Current International Financial Markets

This dissertation consists of three essays that address recent developments in international financial markets that have been of concern for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. The first essay examines how cultural factors can influence individual investors' trading behavior in response to risk in nine Eurozone countries. The markets studied were particularly affected by the global financial crisis, the subsequent European banking crisis, and the European sovereign debt crisis. Using mutual fund flows as proxy of investors' trading behavior, our evidence indicates that a country culture variable significantly affects investors' trading responsiveness to risk. Specifically, the impact of risk on fund flows is significantly positive and is larger in scale in countries with individualist cultures. The second essay attempts to investigate the effects of negative interest rate policies (NIRP) on foreign exchange and equity markets of eight European countries and Japan. To see the impacts of these policies, event studies and regime-switching vector autoregressive regression analyses are conducted for the nine countries that implement NIRP. The results provide valid evidence that the announcement of NIRP has a transitory effect on currency depreciation; long term effects are less evident. On the day of NIRP implementation, both currency and equity market returns reacted in response to the event efficiently and negatively, especially in Switzerland's case. These outcomes suggest that simulative monetary policy by lowering interest rates below zero might have counter-effects from those observed when interest rates are lowered, but to rates that remain positive. Additionally, findings from the long term analyses explain that interest rate term structure and cointegration level of local and the U.S. equity index may be related to effectiveness of NIRP in currency and equity markets, respectively. The last essay examines the determinants of the price of the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. The analyses identify a number of factors that significantly affect the returns to investments in Bitcoin including: trading volume, high-low price spread, and extreme price change in the previous period. The latter result supports the assertion that recent severe price fluctuations in Bitcoin markets are primarily due to speculative investment activities. Furthermore, evidences suggested in this study explain possibility of market compromise and inefficiency of the cryptocurrency market, implying pivotal risks for Bitcoin market participants.