We investigate the behavior of consumer confidence around national elections in the EU-15 countries during 1985:1-2007:3. Consumer confidence increases before the date of elections and falls subsequently by almost the same amount. It is able to predict the strength of the performance of the...

The paper characterizes several empirical regularities of closed- end fund prices and examines the extent to which a 'sentiment' model of asset prices is consistent with the empirical regularities. We find that after controlling for the effect of cross-border investment restrictions, country...

The general price level does not provide a sensitive indicator of whether monetary policy is tight or loose, because mostprices are sticky. Interest rates are free to move, but they are an ambiguous indicator of monetary policy: one does not know whether changes in the interest rate are due to...

This paper shows that during the 1990s the process of gradual economic and monetary integration, which eventually led to EMU, also resulted in a reduction in the equity cost of capital. A similar reduction was not present in the three EU countries which chose not to enter the Eurozone. There was...

The prices of Greek closed-end funds behave similarly to the prices of U.S. funds: They deviate substantially from their net asset values (NAVs), they are more volatile than their NAVs, they are overly-sensitive to the movements of the domestic stock market index, and their premia are: (i)...

In this paper, we find that firms with low (high) accruals experience positive (negative) abnormal returns only when they are characterized by high (low) value/growth measures (book to market ratio and free cash flow yield). The level of accruals of those firms is found to be attributable to...

In this paper, we find that firms with low (high) accruals experience positive (negative) abnormal returns only when they are characterized by high (low) value/growth measures (book to market ratio and free cash flow yield). The level of accruals of those firms is found to be attributable to...

This article addresses key issues of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, its broader economic distress and growth implications for the Euro Area and offers suggested remedies including growth indexed bonds, fiscal balances over a growth cycle, structural reforms, and using real option analysis in...

We examine the relation of expected stock returns with fund style concentration in stock ownership over the period 1997-2015. Concentration is measured by the Herfindahl index H of the shares of different investment styles in the ownership of stocks and represents a measure of investor...

We study theoretically and empirically the relationship between investor beliefs, ownership dispersion and stock returns. We find that high dispersion, measured by high breadth or low Herfindahl index, forecasts returns positively for large stocks, as in Chen, Hong and Stein (2002), but...