Maria Boutchkova

Precarious Politics and Return Volatility

We examine how local and global political risks affect industry return volatility. Our central premise is that some industries are more sensitive to political events than others. We find that industries that are more dependent on trade, contract enforcement, and labor exhibit greater return volatility when local political risks are higher. Political uncertainty in countries of trading partners of trade-dependent industries similarly results in greater volatility. Volatility decomposition results indicate that while systematic volatility is associated with domestic political uncertainty, global political risks translate into larger idiosyncratic volatility. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com., Oxford University Press.

Privatization and the Rise of Global Capital Markets

We examine the growth in global capital market valuation, trading volume and security issuance over the past two decades. After estimating the impact of share issue privatizations on the growth of stock markets, we find that privatizations have significantly increased market liquidity, as measured by the turnover ratio. We examine the effect privatizations have had on the pattern of share ownership by individuals and institutional investors and find that privatizations have dramatically increased the number of shareholders in many countries. However, the extremely large numbers of shareholders created by many share issue privatizations are not a stable ownership structure.

The “Clicker” Project: A Scholarly Approach to Technology Integration

How can we make larger classes more interactive, with all students (even those in the back row) feeling engaged, reflective, and questioning ideas being presented? How do we get students to read before coming to class and prepared to take an exam? How do professors get the most out of their lectures and class time? These are the kind of questions guiding a research study on “clicker” technology in the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. The purpose of this study is to evaluate systematically the use of clickers in a business classroom context.