This empirical research aims to identify the relationship between fiscal and financial macroeconomic fundamentals and the volatility of government bonds’ borrowing cost in an emerging country - Vietnam. The study covers the period from July 2006 to December 2019 and it is based on a sample of 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year government bonds, which represent short-term, medium-term and long-term sovereign bonds in Vietnam, respectively. The Generalized AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model and its derivatives such as EGARCH and TGARCH are applied on monthly dataset to examine and suggest a significant effect of fiscal and financial determinants of bond yield volatility. The findings of this study indicate that the variation of Vietnam government bond yields is in compliance with the theories of term structure of interest rate. The results also show that a proportion of the variation in the yields on Vietnam government bonds is attributed to the interest rate itself in the previous period, base rate, foreign interest rate, return of the stock market, fiscal deficit, public debt, and current account balance. Our results could be helpful in the macroeconomic policy formulation for policy-makers and in the investment practice for investors regarding the prediction of bond yield volatility.

The study aims to examine the impact of productivity in addition to the policy of increasing the foreign investors’ ownership rate on the performance of businesses which were listed on Vietnam's stock exchange market from 2010 to 2017. With the database of 3.961 observations, the study employs a statistical method – multiple regression to estimate the relationship between labor productivity, foreign ownership as well as other firm-level characteristics and firm performance. Research findings show that increasing labor productivity and increasing foreign ownership rates help increase firm performance. In addition, except for financial leverage, variables such as liquidity and firm size have positive effects on firm performance measured by Tobin’s Q. These findings have theoretical contributions and practical implications for managers, investors and government in Vietnam. Managers should pay attention to improving labor productivity through employing incentive mechanisms, building a good working environment, investing in technology, etc. in order to enhance the firm performance. Investors could utilize the labor productivity and foreign ownership indicators to select stocks of good companies for investment. For Vietnamese government, relaxing the limit of foreign ownership and accelerating the divesting of State capital in Stateowned enterprises could help increase the investment scale of foreign investors and resulting in positive effects on the firm performance.