We investigate the influence of various fundamental variables on a cross-section of credit default swap transaction data. Credit default swap rates can be seen as a superior proxy to credit risk than bond spreads are. Because we have transaction prices rather than quotes, we have thus...

Morck, Yeung and Yu (MYY, 2000) show that R2 and other measures of stock market synchronicity are higher in countries with less developed financial systems and poorer corporate governance. MYY and Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel and Xu (2001) also find a secular decline in R2 in the United States over...

To obtain the maximum benefits from diversification, financial theory suggests that investors should invest internationally because of the larger potential for risk reduction stemming from the lower correlation exisiting between assets of different countries. The question that we raise in this...

The paper investigates whether US, Japanese and European stock and government bond return indices are jointly priced within a conditional multivariate form of the international Capital asset Pricing Model during the period 1993-2001. It also explores the time variation of the price of market...

This paper investigates the relative influences of industrial and country factors in international stock returns. Until very recently, academic research has consistently found that country factors dominate industrial factors. This result is in contradiction with practitioners beliefs. This paper...

This paper tests a conditional version of Adler and Dumas'(1983) International CAPM with regime switching GARCH parameters. As benchmark the same model is estimated without state dependent parameters. The switching representation is found to react faster than the benchmark to shocks in stock...

This paper examines the determinants of stock returns in a small open economy using an APT framework. The analysis is conducted for the Swiss stock market which has the particularity of including a large proportion of firms that are exposed to foreign economic conditions. Both a statistical and...

The paper tests a conditional multivariate International Capital Asset Pricing Model for US, Japanese and European stocks and government bonds, covering the period 1993-2001. Time variation in the prices of market and currency risk is modelled by means of synchronous regime switching. The paper...

According to standard theory, wealth should have no intrinsic value. Yet, conventional wisdom, recent theories, and data suggest it might. We verify whether or not households have direct preferences over wealth in selecting assets. The fully structural econometric model focuses on a multivariate...

A few recent papers have derived estimates of the representative agent's risk aversion by comparing the statistical density of asset returns and the state-price density. The implied risk aversion estimates obtained in these studies are puzzling, exhibiting (i) pronounced U-shaped patterns (a...