At the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, many soccer matches were played during stock market trading hours, providing us with a natural experiment to analyze fluctuations in investor attention. Using minute-by-minute trading data for fifteen international stock exchanges, we present three key...

The end result of major sporting events has been shown to affect next-day stock returns through shifts in investor mood. By studying the soccer matches that led to the elimination of France and Italy from the 2010 FIFA World Cup, we show that mood-related pricing effects can materialize as...

This paper analyses investment strategies of three types of institutional investors pension funds, life insurers and non-life insurers over the period 1999-2005. We use balance sheet and cash flow data, including purchases and sales of equity, fixed income and real estate. We trace asset...

Retail clients at a major German discount broker trade in tandem - they tend to be on the same side of the market in a given stock during a given day, week, month, and quarter. Neither aggregate liquidity effects nor short sale constraints fully explain this behavior. The systematic execution of...

We test for the presence of a systematic tail risk premium in the cross-section of expected returns by applying a measure on the sensitivity of assets to extreme market downturns, the tail beta. Empirically, historical tail betas help to predict the future performance of stocks under extreme...

This paper investigates the ability of the adaptive learning approach to replicate the expectations of professional forecasters. For a range of macroeconomic and financial variables, we compare constant and decreasing gain learning models to simple, yet powerful benchmark models. We find that...

Administrative and investment costs per participant appear to vary widely across pension funds. These costs are important because they reduce the rate of return on the investments of pension funds and consequently raise the cost of retirement security. This paper examines the impact of...

In the empirical literature, not much support is found for the uncovered interest parity. Especially with free floating exchange rates, the forward rate is a biased predictor of the future exchange rate. This phenomenon can both be explained by an absence of rational expectations or by risk...

Using an event study approach, we examine the impact of news about Greece and news about a Greek bailout on bank stock prices in 2010 using data for 48 banks included in the European stress tests. We identify the twenty days with extreme returns on Greek sovereign bonds and categorize the news...

This paper provides a survey on recent developments in the European banking industry. Traditional banking activities have contracted in relative terms, but banks remain the predomination players in the euro area financial system. Economic and monetary integration in the EU has strongly...