We analyze the interaction of stock market movements and politics in Germany. In contrast to the empirical evidence available for the U.S., we do not find that German stock market returns tend to be higher during liberal than during conservative governments. Also in contrast to results for the...

Maximum likelihood estimation of discretely observed diffusion processes is mostly hampered by the lack of a closed form solution of the transient density. It has recently been argued that a most generic remedy to this problem is the numerical solution of the pertinent Fokker-Planck (FP) or...

This paper shows how exact solutions for the transient density of a large class of continuous-time Markov switching models can be obtained. We illustrate the pertinent approach for both simple diffusion models with a small number of regimes as well as for the more complicated so-called Poisson...

This study re-examines the return-volatility relationship and dynamics under a new VAR framework. By analyzing two model-free implied volatility indices - VIX (the U.S.) and VKOSPI (Korea) - and their corresponding stock market indices, we found an asymmetric volatility phenomenon in both...

The article examines causal relationships between sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) prices for the BRICS and most important EU economies (Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain) during the European debt crisis. The cross-correlation function (CCF) approach used in the research distinguishes...

Daily financial market returns (as log difference in closing prices) may be quite sensitive to operations with low trading volumes and big changes in prices frequently traded at market closing times. This paper proposes a more robust estimation of market, returns by providing a new indicator...

Traditional risk-adjusted performance measures, such as the Sharpe ratio, the Treynor index or Jensen's alpha, based on the mean-variance framework, are widely used to rank mutual funds. However, performance measures that consider risk by taking into account only losses, such as Value-at-Risk...

Guasoni (2006) introduced a simple condition for the absence of arbitrage opportunities. In this note we show that his results remain valid under a weaker notion of arbitrage which arises by excluding liquidation costs from the value process of a portfolio

We analyze foreigners’ and domestic institutional investors’ positions in U.S. equities. Controlling for many factors, we uncover a common preference for large firms and firms that are diversified internationally. The domestic preference for internationally diversified firms implies that...

We explore the link between international stock market comovement and the degree to which firms operate globally. Using stock returns and balance sheet data for companies in 20 countries, we estimate a factor model that decomposes stock returns into global, country-specific and industry-specific...