The paper explores whether the co-movement of market returns and equity fundflows can be explained by a common response to macroeconomic news. I findthat variables that predict the real economy as well as the equity premium arerelated to mutual fund flows. Changes in dividend-price ratio explain...

This paper investigates the returns and °ows of German money marketfunds before and during the liquidity crisis of 2007/2008. The main¯ndings of this paper are: in liquid times, money market funds en-hanced their returns by investing in less liquid papers. By doing sothey outperformed other...

This paper investigates whether investor sentiment can explain stock returns on theGerman stock market. Based on a principal component analysis, we construct a senti-ment indicator that condenses information of several well-known sentiment proxies. Weshow that this indicator explains the return...

The paper deals with the evaluation of Collateralized Debt Obligations forinvestment purposes. CDOs are classified in the asset backed environment. Itsspecific risks (market, timing, recovery, agency) are discussed. To understand theportfolio aspect, the concept of the diversity score is...

We investigate the problem of modeling defaults of dependent credits.In the framework of the class of structural default models we studythreshold models where for each credit the underling ability-to-payprocess is a transformation of a Wiener processes. We propose a modelfor dependent defaults...

We examine whether consumer confidence – as a proxy for individual investor sentiment –affects expected stock returns internationally in 18 industrialized countries. In line with recentevidence for the U.S., we find that sentiment negatively forecasts aggregate stock marketreturns on average...

Using a new data set on investor sentiment we show that institutional and individualsentiment proxy for smart money and noise trader risk, respectively. First, usingbias-adjusted long-horizon regressions, we document that institutional sentiment forecastsstock market returns at intermediate...

The puzzling evidence of seemingly high momentum returns is related to an understanding ofrisk as a simple covariance. If we consider, however, risk in higher-order statistical moments,momentum returns appear less advantageous.