This paper empirically investigates international equity investors' foreign portfolios before and during the financial crisis by estimating a gravity model for 22 source and 42 destination countries. The results show that international stock market diversification provides large gains during the...

Abstract We consider three measures on the systemic importance of a financial institu- tion within a interconnected financial system. Based on the measures, we study the relation between the size of a financial institution and its systemic importance. From both theo- retical model and empirical...

Empirical research on contagion between international stock markets generally focuses on market returns converted to US dollars, as this would be consistent with the perspective of an international investor. This note argues that such a conversion is inappropriate, since only returns denominated...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a red herring&; once one corrects for the endogeneity of natural resource exports and allows resource abundance to have an effect on growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer...

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 analyses the reforms in the architecture of EMU since the eruption of the euro crisis in 2010. We describe major weaknesses in the original set-up of EMU, such as lack of fiscal discipline, diverging financial cycles and competitiveness positions, and a lack of crisis instruments....