The Baker and Wurgler (2006) sentiment index purports to measure irrational investor sentiment, while the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is designed to largely reflect fundamentals. Removing this fundamental component from the Baker and Wurgler index creates an index of investor...

Volatility is an important component of asset pricing; an increase in volatility on markets can trigger changes in the risk distribution of financial assets. In conventional financial theory, investors are considered to be rational and any changes in relevant risk are assumed to be a result of...

Sentiment indices based on investor sentiment surveys attempt to measure the stock market sentiment. The literature on these indices focusses mainly on whether investor sentiment influences the financial markets or not. But the term “sentiment” has never been defined in the literature....

News carry information of market moves. The gargantuan plethora of opinions, facts and tweets on financial business offers the opportunity to test and analyze the influence of such text sources on future directions of stocks. It also creates though the necessity to distill via statistical...

The behavioural finance literature attributes the persistent market misvaluation observed in real data to the presence of deviations from rational thinking of the actors involved. Cognitive biases and the use of simple heuristics can be described using expected utility maximising agents that...

Diversification benefits depend on the correlation between assets. Unfortunately, asset correlation increases when it is most needed. We examine bond correlation using a broad sample of US corporate bonds. We find bond correlation to be higher during the financial crisis in 2008. Increased bond...

The information contained in investor sentiment has up to now hardly been used for portfolio optimization, although theoretical works demonstrate that it should not be neglected and it has already been shown to contain exploitable information on future returns and volatility. Employing the...

In October 2002, a substitution reform was introduced in the Swedish pharmaceuticals market. In this paper, the effects of increased price competition due to the reform on the entry of new pharmaceutical products were studied. The results show that the reform did affect the entry behavior of...

This paper studies the effect of pharmaceutical regulation at the wholesale level, if markets are integrated by parallel trade, i.e. trade outside the manufacturerś authorized distribution channel. In particular, maximum wholesale margins, a restriction of pricing by the intermediary, and...

This paper studies externalities of nationally determined cost-sharing systems, in particular coinsurance rates (patients pay a percentage of the price), under pharmaceutical parallel trade in a two-country model with a vertical distributor relationship. Parallel trade generates a...