The Russian establishment- politicians, agricultural officials, corporate farm managers, the media- firmly believe that inadequate access to credit is one of the major factors constraining the growth of the agricultural sector. In technical terms, they in effect claim that Russian agriculture...

This paper studies the excess returns on stocks, associated to various company fundamentals on a panel of US stocks from 1979 to 2008. The returns premia are measured using a random coefficient panel data model on the individual stock level. We show that the HML and SMB factors in the Fama and...

Capitalizing on the results in Shapovalova et al. (2011a} and Shapovalova et al. (2011b} on the properties of the stock returns premia, this paper focuses on the practical issues of equity style investment. Company fundamentals are often used to define the so-called style scores, from which the...

Many papers claim that value and size fundamentals (book-to-price ratios and market capitalization) yield positive expected return premia because they are proxies for systematic risk factors in conditional and/or multi-factor CAPM. Much of empirical evidence to support this idea comes from...

Stocks with low market price relatively to the accounting fundamentals of the issuing company (value stocks) have higher expected returns than those with high market price (growth stocks) for the same level of systematic risk. The same holds for the stocks of small companies, compared to...

It is a common wisdom that individual stocks' returns are difficult to predict, though in many situations it is important to have such estimates at our disposal. In particular, they are needed to determine the cost of capital. Market equilibrium models posit that expected returns are...

We overview different methods of modeling volatility of stock prices and exchange rates, focusing on their ability to reproduce the empirical properties in the corresponding time series. The properties of price fluctuations vary across the time scales of observation. The adequacy of different...

We decompose volatility of a stock market index both in time and scale using wavelet filters and design a probabilistic indicator for valatilities, analogous to the Richter scale in geophysics. The peak-over-threshold method is used to fit the generalized Pareto probability distribution for the...

Value and growth investment styles are a concept which has gained extreme popularity over the past two decades, probably due to its practical efficiency and relative simplicity. We study the mechanics of different factors' impact on excess returns in a multivariate setting. We use a panel of...