The creation of Bitcoin heralded the arrival of digital or crypto-currency and has been regarded as a phenomenon. Since its introduction, it has experienced a meteoric rise in price and rapid growth accompanied by huge volatility swings, and also attracted plenty of controversies which even involved law enforcement agencies. Hence, claims abound that bitcoin has been characterised by bubbles ready to burst any time (e.g. the recent collapse of Bitcoin's biggest exchange, Mt Gox). This has earned plenty of coverage in the media but surprisingly not in the academic literature. We therefore fill this knowledge gap. We conduct an econometric investigation of the existence of bubbles in the bitcoin market based on a recently developed technique that is robust in detecting bubbles -that of Phillips, Shi and Yu (2013a). Over the period 2010-2014, we detected a number of short-lived bubbles; most importantly, we found three huge bubbles in the latter part of the period 2011-2013 lasting from 66 days to 106 days, with the last and biggest one being the one that 'broke the camel's back" -the demise of the Mt Gox exchange.

The paper examines the impact of political and economic freedom on inbound tourism for over 110 countries during 1995-2012. Panel country fixed-effects techniques are utilized to examine the relationship after controlling for other factors that contribute to inbound tourism.The results show that civil liberties and economic freedom (among several other freedom measures) are positively and significantly associated with inbound tourism. Examination of the moderation effect reveals that civil liberties (economic freedom) tend to play a more influential role on inbound tourism when the level of economic freedom (civil liberties) is relatively low.

No abstract

Our newly constructed index of corporate governance quality (CGQ) provides comprehensive and robust evidence for the association between CGQ and stock liquidity in the pure order-driven Australia market. By using a large sample of 1,207 firms from 2001 to 2013, we find a significant positive relationship between CGQ and stock liquidity, suggesting that better governed firms have greatly improved stock liquidity. Specifically, we find that better governed firms have a lower trading cost, smaller price impacts of trade, and higher trading speed. Moreover, the empirical results reveal that CGQ improves stock liquidity because it is associated with higher information disclosure.

This paper examines the effects of economic freedom, democracy and its interaction term on controlling corruption. The results indicate that interaction between economic freedom and democracy has a significant impact on combating corruption. Partial effect analysis shows that economic freedom reduces corruption in any political environment, and the effect is substantially greater with a higher-level of democracy. In contrast democracy increases corruption when the level of economic liberalization is low, however, once past the threshold level corruption is substantially lower with full economic freedom.