The aim of this paper is to study the impact of political uncertainty, driven by the Tunisian Revolution, on return and volatility of major sectorial stock indices in the Tunisian Stock Exchange. We specifically use EGARCH (1.1) model from 01/12/2010 to 31/08/2016. This model is applied to the daily returns relevant to ten sectorial stock indices and to the Tunisian benchmark index (TUNINDEX). To test the impact of political news on returns and volatility, we divided them into two groups (good and bad news). Our results show that both of good and bad news have increased the volatility of major selected indices, including the TUNINDEX. However, the return of all indices are not affected by the political news. We then examined the impact of terrorism on the behavior of indices return and volatility. Results show that the Tunisian market responds significantly to terrorist acts. Hence, the return declines and the volatility increase the day of terrorist attacks. Furthermore, results confirm that bad news have stronger effect on the volatility than good news, which reveal the asymmetric effect of volatility.

It has been a challenge for financial economists to explain some stylized facts observed in securities markets, among them, high levels of trading volume. The most prominent explanation of excess volume is overconfidence. High market returns make investors overconfident and as a consequence, these investors trade more subsequently and make some transactions more aggressively. The aim of our paper is to study the impact of the phenomenon of overconfidence on the trading volume and its role in the formation of the excess volume on the Tunisian stock market. Based on the work of Statman, Thorley and Vorkink (2006) and by using VAR models and impulse response functions, we find a little evidence of the overconfidence hypothesis when we use volume (shares traded) as proxy of trading volume.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship of overconfidence and illusion of control towards the start of new venture, taking in consideration the mediating role of risk perception in the context of Tunisia. This article examines students' responses to surveys based on a teaching case titled “Optical Distortion, Inc.” The authors tested hypotheses by correlation and regression analysis. The results show that the perception towards risk associated with new venture plays an important role in decision-making. Moreover, they find that overconfidence and illusion of control reduce risk perception associated to the decision to start a venture. While overconfidence directly affects the decision to start a venture and indirectly through its effect on reducing the risk perception, illusion of control has neither a direct nor an indirect impact on that. These results partially confirm those of Simon show that the mediation exists but partially.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the presence of the anchoring bias in the financial decision making of individual investors. A survey study is carried out to find out how the studied bias affects the investment behavior on the Tunisian stock market. The survey is for exploratory purpose and it is based on multiple factorial correspondence analyses. The results reveal that Tunisian investors do not suffer from the anchoring bias.

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