Seasonal anomalies of stocks in ASEAN equity markets

This study examines the daily anomalies in the five ASEAN equity markets of Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines before, during and after the Asian financial crisis. The regression results reveal different patterns among these markets for each of the three periods. The Monday and Friday effects are most predominant during the pre-crisis period. Only the Tuesday effect in Thailand and the Philippines is observed during the crisis period. While the pattern of daily anomalies in Thailand during the post-crisis period reverts to that of the pre-crisis period, the other four markets exhibit different patterns of daily anomalies compared to the pre-crisis period. When the time-varying return volatility is taken into account through the use of GARCH-M model, the Monday effect remains significant while some of the other daily anomalies have become insignificant during the pre-crisis period. The Tuesday effect in Thailand and the Philippines disappears altogether during the crisis period. Only the Monday and Friday effects in Thailand persist in the post-crisis period

Producing locality: Space, houses and public culture in a Hindu festival in Malaysia

oai:eprints.sunway.edu.my:1Victor Turner's concepts of liminality and communitas have left an indelible mark on anthropological studies on ritual. Basically, Turner argued that there is a dialectic between the mediacy of social structure (characterised as a 'closed society' or 'status system') and the immediacy of communitas (an 'open society'). This article argues for a more fluid understanding of these kinds of social processes, drawing from Arjun Appadurai's char acterisation of a 'locality'as a 'complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity and the relativity of contexts'. This is illustrated through the ethnographic description and analy sis of a local annual Hindu festival in an urban squatter settlement in Malaysia. While the mythic territoriality of the female deity primarily engenders symbolic boundary-making and life-sustaining activities, it also constitutes other layers of social spaces for organ isers and participants alike. Individual and corporate agendas overlap and criss-cross one another. Local knowledge is both parochial and constituted within the wider religious, social and political landscapes. Altogether, these kinds of activities contribute towards a 'public culture' of Hinduism in Malaysia, characterised both by differentiation and the semblance of communitas