Using the 2007-2009 financial crisis as a laboratory, we analyze the transmission of crises to country-industry equity portfolios in 55 countries. We use an asset pricing framework with global and local factors to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings as...

This paper argues that the European banking crisis can in part be explained by a “carry trade” behavior of banks. Factor loading estimates from multifactor models relating equity returns to GIPSI (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy) and German government bond returns suggest that...

The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting...

We analyze the effect that real-time domestic and foreign news about fundamentals have on the correlation of stock returns of a small open economy, Portugal, and a large open economy, the U.S. We also study the role of public and private information in the price formation process in the U.S. and...

A sizeable literature examines exchange rate pass-through to disaggregated import prices but very few micro-studies focus on consumer prices. This paper explores exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices in South Africa during 2002-2007, using a unique data set of highly disaggregated data...

I asked "Does the Current Account Matter?" in Corden (1991). In that article I made a distinction between the Old View and the New View of the current account. The present paper will not repeat the exposition of these two views in any detail. Rather, the aim is both to improve on the rigour of...

This paper presents an industry equilibrium model where firms can choose to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. We model CSR activities as an investment in customer loyalty and show that CSR decreases systematic risk and increases firm value. These effects are stronger...

Performance evaluation of venture-capital (VC) payoffs is challenging because payoffs are infrequent, skewed, realized over endogenously varying time horizons, and cross- sectionally dependent. We show that standard stochastic discount factor (SDF) methods can be adapted to handle these issues....

Macroeconomic models with financial frictions typically imply that the excess return on a well-diversified portfolio of corporate bonds is close to zero. In contrast, the empirical finance literature documents large and time-varying risk premia in the corporate bond market (the "credit spread...

Large banks often sell part of their loan portfolio in the form of collateralized debt obligations (CDO) to investors. In this paper we raise the question whether credit asset securitization affects the cyclicality (or commonality) of bank equity values. The commonality of bank equity values...