Programa de Doutoramento em Gestão
Essays on Frontier Markets: Financial Integration, Financial Market Efficiency, Financial Contagion

Orientação:  Andreia Dionísio, Isabel Vieira e Paulo Ferreira

This thesis investigates financial integration, market efficiency, and financial contagion in frontier markets in order to evaluate the potentiality of portfolio diversification. The first essay evaluates Asian frontier and emerging equity markets’ regional and global integration using Gregory and Hansen co-integration tests and detrended cross correlation analysis (DCCA). The results suggest that Asian emerging markets show some evidence of integration with both regional and global markets. From Asian frontier markets, Pakistan is the only one with evidence of integration with both benchmarks. The second essay appraises weak form efficiency of frontier markets to investigate the global correlation and long-range dependence, applying mutual information and Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). The results indicate that Slovenia is the only case where there is evidence compatible with weak form efficiency. The third essay investigates contagion from the US subprime financial crisis to frontier stock markets using Copula models to investigate dependence structures between US and frontier stock markets, before and during US subprime financial crisis. The results show that Croatia and Romania are the ones, most affected by the US subprime crisis. Subsequently, the forth essay investigates the contagion from both recent crises; US subprime financial crisis and European debt crisis to frontier stock market, applying DCCA correlation coefficients to investigate the linkage between crisis originating country stock markets (US and Greece) and those of frontier markets, to assess whether the correlation coefficients significantly increase with the crises. The results indicate that from US subprime crisis, European frontier markets are the ones most affected, followed by Middle Eastern markets. In case of European debt crisis (originated in Greece), the findings show that contagion effect is weaker in frontier markets. 

Keywords: Frontier markets, financial integration, financial contagion, market efficiency, copula models, econophysics, DCCA Cross-Correlation, Detrended Fluctuation Analysis, Mutual Information.