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We examine how the degree of regional financial integration in African stock markets has evolved over the last eleven years. Despite increasing regional economic cooperation, the process of stock market integration has been slow. To facilitate growth via developed financial markets but keep financial stability risk at a minimum, further regional integration should be promoted, and mild capital controls on non-African investors may be necessary. A Diebold-Yilmaz spillover analysis is applied to ten African stock markets for the period between August 2004 and January 2015. We examine spillovers among four regions and among individual countries. Regional integration, as measured by total spillovers in Africa, is increasing but remains very low. These spillovers were temporarily heightened during the global financial crisis. Cross-regional spillovers are high between Northern and Southern Africa. Asymmetric capital controls on African and non-African investors must be considered to foster further regional integration and to mitigate financial stability risk. This is one of the few studies to address the construction of the future architecture of regionally integrated stock markets in emerging countries.

To explain for doctoral students and new faculty, the appropriate techniques for using event study methods while identifying problems that make the method difficult for use in the context of African markets.

We review the finance and strategy literature on event studies, provide an illustrative example of the technique, summarize the prior use of the method in research using African samples, and indicate remedies for problems encountered when using the technique in African markets.

We find limited use of the technique in African markets due to limited data availability which is attributable to problems of infrequent trading, thin markets, and inadequate access to free data.

Our review of the literature on event studies using African data is limited to English-language journals and sources accessible through our library research databases.

More often, researchers will need to use nonparametric techniques to evaluate market responses for companies in or events affecting the African markets.

We make a contribution with this chapter by giving a more detailed description of event study methods and by identifying solutions to problems in using the technique in African markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare the weak‐form efficiency of a set of 24 African continent‐wide stock price indices and those of eight individual African national stock price indices.

Variance‐ratio tests based on ranks and signs were used to examine the weak‐form efficiency of the 32 stock price indices investigated.

On average, it was found that irrespective of the test employed, the returns of all the 24 African continent‐wide stock price indices examined in the study are less non‐normally distributed compared to the eight individual national stock price indices examined. The authors also report evidence of the African continent‐wide stock price indices having significantly better weak‐form informational efficiency than their national counterparts.

The policy implication of this evidence is that the African equity price discovery process can be significantly improved if African stock markets integrate their operations. Economically, this may contribute to improved liquidity and more efficient allocation of capital, which in turn can be expected to have a positive impact on economic growth.

The paper makes two major contributions to the extant literature. First, it offers for the first time a comparative analysis of the informational efficiencies of a sample of national stock price indices as against African continent‐wide stock price indices. Second, there is no prior evidence as to whether African stock markets can improve their informational efficiencies by integrating their operations. The paper fills this gap by demonstrating that the African equity price formation process can be improved if African stock markets integrate their operations.

This paper investigates the impact of the development of capital markets on economic growth in Africa and reports a significant increase in real GDP per capita after stock exchanges are established. This paper also reveals that there are significant improvements in the level of private investments in the post stock market launch era. The results also indicate that stock markets play a complementary role to the banking sector by contributing to the availability of private credit. Although African capital markets are relatively less advanced when compared to capital markets on other continents (particularly in terms of technology, structure, and liquidity), we find that their establishment has been crucial in helping African countries catch up with the rest of the world.

This study aims to explore the possibility that securities markets in selected African countries of Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa play a significant role in capital accumulation using panel data analysis. This is done by exploring the relationship between gross fixed capital formation on the one hand and financial market development indicators on the other hand. Thus, the study aims to examine if stock market size and liquidity are determinants of capital accumulation.

The analysis is based on annual times series from 1991 through 2017 spanning four African stock markets. The analysis utilizes the fixed-effect and random-effect econometric models. The Durbin–Wu–Hausman test is used to choose between the two models.

The key results indicate that stock market capitalization is a positive determinant of gross fixed capital formation. The market value traded and turnover have no relationship with capital formation. Therefore, the role of stock African stock markets in promoting capital accumulation and, subsequently, industrial growth in Africa is seriously questioned.

Only a handful of studies have examined the role of the African securities market in promoting capital accumulation. This study is unique in which it focuses on the leading stock markets in the four corners of Africa. The markets are from Egypt in the north, South Africa from the south, Nigeria from the west and Kenya from the east. These four markets account for a significant segment of all African markets.

As financial markets for environmentally friendly investment grow in both scope and size, analyzing the relationship between green financial markets and African stocks becomes an important issue. Therefore, this paper examines the role of infectious disease-based uncertainty on the dynamic spillovers between African stock markets and clean energy stocks.

The authors employ the dynamic spillover in time and frequency domains and the nonparametric causality-in-quantiles approach over the period of November 30, 2010, to August 18, 2021.

These findings are discernible in this study's analysis. First, the authors find evidence of strong connectedness between the African stock markets and the clean energy market, and long-lived but weak in the short and medium investment horizons. Second, the BDS test shows that nonlinearity is crucial when examining the role of infectious disease-based equity market volatility in affecting the interactions between clean energy stocks and African stock markets. Third, the causal analysis provides evidence in support of a nonlinear causal relationship between uncertainties due to infectious diseases and the connection between both markets, mostly at lower and median quantiles.

Considering the global and recent use of clean energy equities and the stock markets for hedging and speculative purposes, one may argue that rising uncertainties may significantly influence risk transmissions across these markets. This study, therefore, is the first to examine the role of pandemic uncertainty on the connection between clean stocks and the African stock markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymptotic distribution of the extreme daily stock returns in African stock markets over the period 1996‐2007 and examine the implications for downside risk measurement.

Extreme value theory methods are used to model adequately the extreme minimum daily returns in a number of African emerging stock markets.

The empirical results indicate that the generalised logistic distribution best fitted the empirical data over the period of study.

Using the generalised extreme value and normal distributions for risk assessment could lead to an underestimation of the likelihood of extreme share price declines which could potentially lead to inadequate protection against catastrophic losses.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study to examine the lower tail distribution of daily returns for African emerging stock markets.

This study investigates the level of stock return synchronicity in African markets with the aim of establishing whether, contrary to conventional wisdom, stock return synchronicity can be low in countries with relatively weak information environments.

The authors use a sample of five African countries (Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa) and a total of 616 firms over the period 2005–2015. This study's main measure of synchronicity is the R² from a regression of stock returns on index returns. The authors also carry out regression analysis to investigate the main firm-level drivers of synchronicity.

On average, firms in African markets do not exhibit high levels of stock return synchronicity, providing support for the view that stock return synchronicity can be low in markets with relatively weak transparency. The authors, however, observe an increase in the level of synchronicity during the global financial crisis, notably for Ghana and Kenya. In the regression analysis, the main firm-level driver of synchronicity is firm size, while contrary to some previous studies, ownership structure has no impact. The authors also find evidence of the impact of changes in accounting regulation, notably the mandatory adoption of IFRS, on the level stock synchronicity.

This study contributes to the understanding of stock return synchronicity and how price discovery can vary between different information environments. The authors argue that stock returns in African countries may not always fit the stereotypical view that they are synchronous. The level of synchronicity among firms suggests that corporate events may carry some stock price implications.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine return and volatility spillovers between oil and the stock markets of Nigeria and South Africa.

The authors make use of an innovative new methodology of capturing spillovers, which is different from what many existing studies use. The authors employ the measures of return spillovers and volatility spillovers of Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012), referred to as spillover indexes. The spillover index facilitates an assessment of the net contribution of one market in the information transmission mechanism of another market.

The empirical results show bi-directional, but weak interdependence between the South African and Nigerian stock markets returns and oil market returns. The results for volatility spillovers show independence of volatilities between Nigeria stock markets and oil markets, while weak bi-directional spillovers were found between South African equity volatilities and oil volatilities. The time-varying total spillover plots for returns and volatilities are broadly similar and show a trend that has been observed in other studies: an increasing trend during the non-crisis period, a burst in the crisis year, a maintained higher level of transmission afterwards.

Existing studies examining spillovers between oil and stock markets have largely ignored Sub-Saharan African markets. A common feature of existing studies is that they have been conducted for two groups of countries: either European and US markets; or Gulf Cooperation Council markets Thus, this study fills this gap in the literature by examining return and volatility spillovers between oil and the stock markets of Nigeria and South Africa.

The paper evaluates the cross-transmission of returns and volatility shocks between Nigeria and South Africa stock markets to infer the extent of interdependence between the two markets. The paper also makes inference to optimal portfolio weights of holding assets in the two markets.

The paper uses an asymmetric vector autoregressive-exogenous generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (VAR-X GARCH) model to assess the extent of returns and volatility spillovers between Nigeria and South Africa.

The results of the empirical analysis show evidence of shock spillovers from the South African stock market to the Nigerian stock market. Moreover, based on the dynamic Sharpe ratio and portfolio weight optimisation, the results indicate the possibility of portfolio diversification when holding simultaneous positions in the two stock markets.

The results imply the possibility of economic profit for investors who take positions in the two stock markets. The lack of synchronisation of stock markets in the two largest economies in Africa is in contrast with the situations in other regions where stock markets returns of large economies often co-move.

The paper is the first to use the asymmetric VAR-X GARCH model to assess the cross-transmission of shocks between stock markets.