Designing an investment strategy in transition economies is a difficult task because stock-markets opened through time, time series are short, and there is little guidance how to obtain expected returns and covariance matrices necessary for mean-variance portfolio allocation. Also, structural...

We analyse the conditional versions of two closely connected mean-variance investment problems, the replication of a contingent claim on the one hand and the selection of an efficient portfolio on the other hand, in a general discrete time setting with incomplete markets. <p> We exhibit a positive...</p>

Testing the hypothesis that international equity market correlation increases in volatile times is a difficult exercise and misleading results have often been reported in the past because of a spurious relationship between correlation and volatility. This paper focuses on extreme correlation,...

Correlation in international equity returns is unstable over time. It has been suggested that the international correlation of large stock returns, especially negative ones, differs from that of usual returns. It is in periods of extreme negative returns that the benefits of international risk...

Author's abstract. We investigate the economic consequences of increasing financial report visibility, measured by the use of english as a reporting language for firms from non-English-speaking countries. We sample 113 firms that started publishing their annual report in English (in addition to...

Speculators can discover whether a signal is true or false by processing it but this takes time. Hence they face a trade-off between trading fast on a signal (i.e., before processing it), at the risk of trading on a false positive, or trading after processing the signal, at the risk that prices...

While it is generally maintained that earnings management can occur to inform as well as to mislead, evidence that earnings management informs has been scarce, and evidence that credibility increases with signal costliness inexistent. We provide evidence that firms use discretion over financial...

Speed matters: we show that an investor's optimal trading strategy is significantly different when he observes news faster than others versus when he does not, holding the precision of his signals constant. When the investor has fast access to news, his trades are much more sensitive to news,...

In this paper we show that long run market informational inefficiency is perfectly compatible with standard rational sequential trade models. Our inefficiency result is obtained taking into account two features of actual financial markets: tradable quantities belong to a quantity grid and...

This paper introduces a model, based on the Kalman filter framework, which allows for latent factors, time varying parameters, and a general GARCH structure for the residuals, extending the Bekaert and Harvey (1997) model. With this extension it is possible to test if an emerging stock market...