The creation of Bitcoin heralded the arrival of digital or crypto-currency and has been regarded as a phenomenon. Since its introduction, it has experienced a meteoric rise in price and rapid growth accompanied by huge volatility swings, and also attracted plenty of controversies which even involved law enforcement agencies. Hence, claims abound that bitcoin has been characterised by bubbles ready to burst any time (e.g. the recent collapse of Bitcoin's biggest exchange, Mt Gox). This has earned plenty of coverage in the media but surprisingly not in the academic literature. We therefore fill this knowledge gap. We conduct an econometric investigation of the existence of bubbles in the bitcoin market based on a recently developed technique that is robust in detecting bubbles -that of Phillips, Shi and Yu (2013a). Over the period 2010-2014, we detected a number of short-lived bubbles; most importantly, we found three huge bubbles in the latter part of the period 2011-2013 lasting from 66 days to 106 days, with the last and biggest one being the one that 'broke the camel's back" -the demise of the Mt Gox exchange.

This paper investigates the price linkages between the equity market of Australia and that of the US, UK, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea using weekly MSCI stock market data covering the period 1974-1995. Cointegration test using the Johansen (Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 12, 1988) and Johansen and Juselius (Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 52, 1990) procedure and Granger-causality tests based on error-correction models and standard vector autoregression models are conducted. No cointegration was found between Australia and the other markets. However, the Granger-causality and forecast variance decomposition analyses reveal that Australia is significantly linked with the US and the UK. The impulse response analyses further show that Australia responds to shocks from the US and the UK immediately during the first week and this response is completed with a period of four weeks.

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Using bootstrap causality tests with leveraged adjustments, the link between exchange rates and stock prices in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand is investigated for the periods immediately before and during the 1997 Asian crisis. Two variables are found to be significantly linked in the non-crisis period but not at all during the crisis period. The implications of this result in terms of hedging, market efficiency, market integration and policy intervention are explained in the paper.

We examine the impact on returns, risk and liquidity of stocks in the Asia Pacific markets when included into and deleted from the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index over the period 2002-2010. Using an event study methodology, we test five existing hypotheses and two new ones, called the "sustainability taste hypothesis" and "sustainability redundancy hypothesis", which we developed. Consistent with the "sustainability redundancy hypothesis", we find that both index addition and index deletion stocks experience a significant decline in returns, an increase in trading volume, no change in systematic risk and an increase in idiosyncratic risk. This indicates that sustainability matters to Asia Pacific investors, although in a somewhat negative manner.

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