The causes of the 2008 collapse and subsequent surge in global capital flows remain an open and highly controversial issue. Employing a factor model coupled with a dataset of high-frequency portfolio capital flows to 50 economies, the paper finds that common shocks--key crisis events as well as...

An important question in international finance is to what extent stock return volatility is influenced by country location, industry affiliation, and global factors. This Paper develops a new methodology to measure these effects, in which portfolios mimicking ‘pure’ country and industry...

This study develops three heuristics to measure financial optimism: financial expectation, a priori optimism, and a posteriori optimism. This paper finds that financial optimism has a significant positive effect on risk taking behaviour. Optimistic investors choose risky portfolios over...

Conventional wisdom views stocks as less volatile over long horizons than over short horizons due to mean reversion induced by return predictability. In contrast, we find stocks are substantially more volatile over long horizons from an investor's perspective. This perspective recognizes that...