This paper reveals findings from extending corporate credit rating studies towards (i) new ratings, affirmation, confirmation, watchlists, and withdrawal, which together represent five out of eight rating types yet to be studied rigorously (there are several papers on upgrades and downgrades); and (ii) identifying key firm-specific factors affecting stock prices around the rating revisions in markets not yet studied. The firmspecific factor effects are measured using the Ordered Probit methodology. Results show that investment and speculation grade issues have the most pronounced effects on price changes. Further findings are: interest-coverage, profitability and leverage ratios, all of which stand out as the most relevant firm-specific factors correlated with stock price changes. An interesting new finding is the discovery of corruption perception scores as a new measure is significantly influencing affirmation, confirmation and downgrade ratings. These new findings are likely to be of interest to investors, corporations wanting to know rating change effects and the external regulators concerned with financial weaknesses/strengths of listed firms facing rating changes.

This paper reveals the degree of integration of financial markets in selected ASEAN economies. Few studies on this topic provide evidence that integration of the region's financial markets remains limited, despite the steady growth of intra-ASEAN trade (the share of intra-ASEAN trade to total ASEAN trade increased from 17% in 1990 to 24% in 2013). Over time, while the demand for financial services to support economic activities has led to financial system growth alongside economic development, the financial services appear to have less integration. We applied correlation and cointegration analyses to study financial integration over two periods (before and after the Asian financial crisis of three countries, namely Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand and three non-ASEAN countries, namely Hong Kong, Japan and the USA). Pairwise correlation of money-market rates appear to have increased from 8 (pre-crisis) to 15 (post-crisis) significantly. The multivariate co-integration test suggests the presence of at least two cointegrating equations (pre-crisis and post-crisis) in the money and stock markets of the ASEAN region.

This paper reports key findings about currency risk using two samples of listed firms: one sample with zero foreign currency revenues, hence having zero-currency risk; and the other sample with positive revenues in foreign currencies from foreign transactions. The latter is therefore, exposed to currency risk. Asset pricing theories predict that stocks of currency-risk-exposed firms should suffer significant currency risk, while those firms with zero-currency-risk should not have any effect from currency risk since currency transactions across borders is nil. The latter hypothesis has yet to be tested explicitly, so there is a gap in the literature. We report stock returns are significantly affected not just for firms with foreign-currency revenues but also for firms with zero foreign-currency transactions. These findings are useful to top management of all businesses to undertake currency-hedge plans for both domestic and international trading firms.