Eighteen papers address a number of financial research topics pertinent to the Pacific Basin region in the 5th volume in the series.

This is the third volume in a series which examines advances in Pacific Basin financial markets. It discusses issues such as time-varying volatility estimates in option pricing, the risk behaviour of Hong Kong firms approaching bankruptcy, and the time value of futures options in Australia.

This second volume in the series discusses a variety of topics in the fields of derivative market analysis, macroeconomic factors, initial public offering studies, foreign exchange topics, financial management concerns and capital asset pricing and market efficiency studies.

Whereas standard regression models force economic relationships or behavior to be fixed through time, stochastic parameter regression models allow relationships to vary slowly--without need for specification of the causes of that variation. The authors thoroughly examine the usefulness of the Kalman filter and state-space modeling in work with the stochastic parameter regression model.