We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that arepoorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but havestrong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global fac-tors are jointly signicant predictors of bond returns, where...

The goal of this paper is to assess, for the first time, the empirical impact of "Kaynes' beauty contest", or "higher order belief", on asset price volatility. The paper shows that heterogeneous expectations induce higher order beliefs and that heterogeneous expectation asset pricing models...

We examine the underpricing and long-term performance of a broad set ofSwiss IPOs from 1983 to 2000. The average market adjusted initial return is34.97%. Our results support the ex ante uncertainty hypothesis, the signal-ling hypothesis and, to some extent, the market cyclicality hypothesis...

This paper presents a new method to detect informed trading activities in the options markets.An option trade is identified as informed when it is characterized by an unusual largeincrement in open interest and volume, induces large gains, and is not hedged in the stock market.For the period...

This paper sheds light on the influence of exchange rate volatility on foreign direct investment (FDI), both at the theoretical and the empirical level. The novelty of the empirical analysis, which is based on a panel of 27 OECD countries over the period 1982-2002, is to provide evidence of a...

We study high-frequency exchange rate movements over the sample 1993–2006. We document that the (Swiss) franc, euro, Japanese yen and the pound tend to appreciate against the U.S. dollar when (a) S&P has negative returns; (b) U.S. bond prices increase; and (c) when currency markets become more...

This paper is about contagion and interdependence among Central European economies. It investigates the extent to which country-specific shocks spread across these countries beyond the normal channels of interdependence, taking into account common external shocks. To model such shocks, we make...

The paper analyzes the long-run performance of dynamic investment strategies based on fixed-mix portfolio rules. Such rules prescribe rebalancing the portfolio by transferring funds between its positions according to fixed (timeindependent) proportions. The focus is on asset markets where prices...

We analyse questions of arbitrage in financial markets in which asset prices change in time as stationary stochastic processes. The main focus of the paper is on a model where the price vectors are independent and identically distributed. In the framework of this model, we find conditions that...

This paper tests two competing hypotheses about the influence of financial institutions as large shareholders on the performance of their industrial portfolio firms: the superior monitoring hypothesis versus the rent extraction hypothesis. The methodology of this study exploits the abolishment...