Abstract: We study the relation between liquidity in financial markets and post-trading fees (i.e. clearing and settlement fees). The clearing and settlement agent (CSD) faces different marginal costs for different types of transactions. Costs are lower for an internalized transaction, i.e. when...

Two important characteristics of current European equity markets are rooted in changes in financial regulation (the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive). The regulation (i) allows new trading venues to emerge, generating a fragmented market place and (ii) allows for a substantial fraction...

In this paper we study portfolios that investors hold to hedge economic risks.Using a model of state-dependent utility, we show that agents economic hedging portfolios can be obtained by an intuitively appealing, risk aversion-weighted approximate replication of the economic risk variables using...

We investigate the relative importance of country and industry factors as determinants of international equity returns in the Euro-zone over the period 1990 to 2003.We conduct our analysis from a portfolio performance perspective, using mean-variance spanning and efficiency tests as well as...

In this paper we estimate and interpret the factors that jointly determine bond returns of different maturities in the US, Germany and Japan.We analyze both currency-hedged and unhedged bond returns.For currency-hedged bond returns, we find that five factors explain 96.5% of the variation of...

Abstract: We analyse daily lead-lag patterns in US equity and credit default swap (CDS) returns. We first document that equity returns robustly lead CDS returns. However, we find that the CDSlag is due to common (and not firm-specific) news and arises predominantly in response to positive...

We use a simple model in which the expected returns in emerging markets depend on their systematic risk as measured by their beta relative to the world portfolio as well as on the level of integration in that market.The level of integration is a time-varying variable that depends on the market...