The impact of non-financial reporting on stock markets in emerging economies

Stock prices are more and more driven by the investors' sentiment which, in turn, is sensitive to various non-financial events like macro-economic releases and social or environmental changes all over the world. In a globalized world, even the emerging and frontier economies such as Romania are following the main trend of the developed markets. The main concern of the last few years in the capital markets across the globe was the European Debt Crisis and for the purpose of this paper, we considered the most important news related to this subject as non-financial reporting. Therefore, major news and reports regarding this issue are seen by investors as the most important factors that are moving the markets. This paper analyses the impact of the relevant EU Debt Crisis news on the main European stock indexes using the price volatility. The results of the study showed, among others, that most of the stock markets reacted to news before it was actually released and from this point of view, the markets are tending towards the semi-strong form of efficiency that Eugene Fama was proposing in the efficient market hypothesis. (c) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of Emerging Markets Queries in Finance and Business local organization