We examine how product market competition and financing constraints influence firm payout policy. Using Compustat firms for the period 1996 to 2017, we show that competition decreases firms' propensity to make payouts via dividends more if the firm is financially constrained. These results are...

This study examines the market level determinants of the portfolio construction process behind minimum variance investing. I show that the minimum variance portfolio (MVP) weight composition will be similar to that of equally weighted portfolio (1/N portfolio) if the ratio of idiosyncratic...

We investigate the effects of investor sentiment on returns and volatility of eight different commodities. Our findings suggest that sentiment has a predictive power on return and volatility of the commodities. Fundamentally, commodities return and volatility are positively associated with the...

This study is the first to document the impact of news sentiment on different classes of assets' returns (stocks, bonds, oil, natural gas, gold, commodities, and foreign exchange rate) during the COVID-19 pandemic. By using time-varying causality test, we find that the causality running from...

This study examines the role of market sentiment in predicting the price bubbles of four strategic metal commodities (gold, silver, palladium, and platinum) from January 1985 to August 2020. It is the first to investigate this topic using sentiment indices, including news-based economic and...

Motivated by a recognition of the increased vulnerability of the banking sector to the COVID-19 pandemic, we examine market-based systemic risk and connectedness in the banking sector of Gulf Cooperation Council member countries, which include Bahrain, Kuwait, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA),...

Firms’ idiosyncratic stock return volatility has become more volatile in the US since the 1960s. This paper investigates why individual stocks became more volatile over the 1964–2013 period using firm-level total factor productivity (TFP). On average, the volatility of idiosyncratic TFP...

In this paper, we exploit multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis (MF-DCCA) to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the cross-correlations between oil and the US equity market (as represented by the S&P 500 index). First, we examine the detrended moving average...