We study what makes government bonds a safe asset. Building on a sample of monthly changes in government bond yields in 40 advanced and emerging countries, we analyse the sensitivity of yields to country specific fundamentals interacted with changes in global risk (VIX). We find that inertia...

Self-control failure is among the major pathologies (Baumeister et al. (1994)) affecting individual investment decisions but cannot be measured bias-free. We link the time-series of government-controlled tobacco prices to debit/credit card transaction histories to identify smoking as a proxy for...

Self-control failure is among the major pathologies (Baumeister et al. (1994)) affecting individual investment decisions which has hardly been measurable in empirical research. We use cigarette addiction identified from checking account transactions to proxy for low self-control and compare over...

This paper tests whether fluctuations in investors' attention affect stock return comovement with national and global markets, and which stocks are most affected. We measure fluctuations in investor attention using 59 high-profile soccer matches played during stock market trading hours at the...

We use cross-country microdata to analyse the risk taking of households in Europe and the US. Concerning the extensive as well as the intensive margin of risky assets, European households differ substantially from US households; but also inside Europe we document substantial differences....

Using German and US brokerage data we find that investors are more likely to sell speculative stocks trading at a gain. Investors' gain realizations are monotonically increasing in a stock's speculativeness. This translates into a high disposition effect for speculative and a much lower...

This paper studies net foreign assets and the differential returns between gross foreign assets and liabilities for a sample of 49 countries between 1981 and 2007. It shows that investment income is more important than capital gains in imparting a drift to net foreign assets over the long-run,...

Global bonds are international securities designed to be traded and settled efficiently in multiple markets. This paper studies global bonds to examine the effects of multimarket trading on corporate bond liquidity, prices, and the cost of debt. Using a sample of primary and secondary market...

Within a two step GARCH framework we estimate the time-varying spillover effects from European and US return innovations to 10 economic sectors within the euro area, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We use daily data from January 1988 - March 2002. At the beginning of our sample...

This paper investigates whether comovements between euro area equity returns at national and industry level have changed after the introduction of the euro. By adopting a regression quantile-based methodology, we find that after 1999 the degree of comovements among euro area national equity...