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The efficient market hypothesis (EMH), which suggests that returns of a stock market are unpredictable from historical price changes, is satisfied when stock prices are characterized by a random walk (unit root) process. A finding of unit root implies that stock returns cannot be predicted. This paper investigates the stock prices behavior of five ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries i.e., Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, for the period from 1990:1 to 2009:1 using a two-regime threshold autoregressive (TAR) approach which allows testing nonlinearity and non-stationarity simultaneously. Among the main findings, our results indicate that stock prices of Malaysia and Thailand are a non-linear series and are characterized by a unit root process, consistent with the EMH. Furthermore, we find that stock prices of Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore follow a non-linear series, however, stock price indices are stationary processes that are inconsistent with the EMH.

Recent research reveals that calendar effects have largely disappeared from stock markets. However, majority of the past studies focus on stock markets at the aggregate level but do not provide firm-level evidence. Therefore, this study investigates day-ofthe-week and month-of-the-year effects in Malaysian finance stocks market for the period 1/1/1997-31/12/2014. The empirical results from threshold GARCH (TGARCH) model suggest that certain daily and monthly seasonality effects are prevalent along with asymmetric news effect. The findings of study indicate inefficiency in the weak-form sense, implying that it is possible for investors to obtain the observed abnormal returns by using timing strategies.

The emergence of the Asian financial crisis in July 1997 had a tremendous impact on the economies of the Asian countries. This study aims at linking the contagion theory and the crisis faced in Malaysia with more emphasis on the effect of the contagion volatility in the currency exchange market. This research uses the co-relation analysis, models of ARCH, GARCH and also GJR-GARCH in demonstrating the link. The results show that the crisis in Malaysia was not merely due to the weakness in its economic fundamentals, but also due to the contagion and volatility effects particularly originated from Thailand and Singapore. This study suggests the need for a more systematic management system with improved transparency in the financial sector even though the effect of the crisis contagion could hardly be prevented.

This paper re-examines the hypothesis of unemployment hysteresis using panel data for 11 Asian countries for the period from 1980 to 2008. This study employs a variety of panel data unit root tests recently advanced by Bai and Ng (2004), Pesaran (2007) and Chang and Song (2009). The advantage of these tests is that they are able to exploit the cross-section variations of the series. In addition to these tests, a new powerful panel stationarity test proposed by Carrión-i-Silvestre et al. (2005) is applied which exploits the cross-section variations of the series and also allows for different numbers of endogenous breakpoints in the series. Our findings stress the importance of accounting exogenous shocks in the series and provide stronger evidence against the hypothesis of unemployment hysteresis for the countries analyzed. We also discover critical economic affairs which may cause the unemployment rates to fluctuate significantly. Policy implications are proposed through our observations.