The stock indices of five ASEAN countries, namely, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines have experienced a structural change after mid-1997 due to the Asian financial crisis, and another shift slightly more than a year later when the markets rebounded. Contemporaneous correlation in stock returns is the strongest and Indonesia leads the movements of the other indices during the crisis. The relative influence of foreign shocks is much more felt during the crisis, as seen in the stronger and longer horizon of responses of all the markets. The stock indices are cointegrated before, but not during the crisis. Price feedbacks between the larger markets of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia that existed before the crisis disappear once the crisis is over. Short-run linkages of Malaysia with the other markets have weakened after the crisis. With an increase in the degree of exogeneity of its stock market, contemporaneous co-movements with the other markets have reduced and the causal relationships no longer exist. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005contagion effects, market inter-relations, regional bloc, structural change,

This paper examines a recently documented time-of-the-month anomaly in five ASEAN equity markets before, during and after the Asian financial crisis. The results show that this anomaly exists in the smaller markets of Indonesia and the Philippines in the pre-crisis period and Indonesia in the post-crisis period. The other bigger markets of Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand do not exhibit such anomaly in any period at all. This anomaly is still observed even when the autocorrelation in stock returns is taken into consideration.

This study examines the issue of herding in the Malaysian equity market over the period 1993 – 2004. Using the method proposed by Christie and Huang (1995), we did not detect any evidence of herding for the whole market, the large firms or the small firms during the pre-crisis, crisis and the post-crisis periods. The modified method of Christie and Huang (1995) produced similar findings. However, using the method proposed by Chang et al. (2000), herding was found in the overall market in the whole period. In the pre-crisis period, herding in the market during the market decline could be attributed to both the large and small firms. Rather surprisingly, there was no herding in the crisis period. In the post-crisis period, herding was detected in the market during market rise and this could be attributed to the small firms. Large firms, on the other hand, witnessed herding during market decline. The modified method of Chang et al. (2000) detected more evidence of herding with the use of cross-sectional inter-quartile range but lessevidence of herding when cross-sectional standard deviation is used.