Any security’s expected return can be decomposed into its “carry” and its expected price appreciation, where carry is a model-free characteristic that can be observed in advance. While carry has been studied almost exclusively for currencies, we find that carry predicts returns both in the...

We examine the extent to which the profitability of the HML, SMB, and WML trading strategies can be linked to future GDP growth. Using a large cross-section of securities from ten developed markets, we find that the HML and SMB portfolios contain significant information about future GDP growth....

We study the investment behaviour of foreign investors in association with an equity market liberalization, and find a strong link between foreigners' trading and local market returns. In the period following the liberalization, foreigners' net purchases led to a permanent increase in prices, or...

The advent of the single currency within the European Union provides a natural experiment to measure how the cost of equity changes as globalization takes place. This is because the launch of the single currency has led to the elimination of currency-related restrictions on the composition of...

This note looks at US$ and DM/Euro denominated government bond spreads relative to US and German benchmark bonds before and after the start of the current financial crisis. The study finds, first, that bond yield spreads before and during the crisis can largely be explained on the basis of...

After negative shocks, investors with short trading horizons are inclined or forced to sell their holdings to a larger extent than investors with longer trading horizons. This may amplify the effects of market-wide shocks on stock prices. We test the relevance of this mechanism by exploiting the...

This paper examines the extent to which individual investors provide liquidity to the stock market, and whether they are compensated for doing so.We show that the ability of aggregate retail order imbalances, contrarian in nature, to predict short-term future returns is significantly enhanced...

We use a repeated survey of an Italian bank’s clients to test whether investors’ risk aversion increases following the 2008 financial crisis. We find that both a qualitative and a quantitative measure of risk aversion increases substantially after the crisis. After considering standard...

The paper analyzes the effects of changes to regulatory policy and to monetary policy on cross-border bank lending since the global financial crisis. Cross-border bank lending has decreased, and the home bias in the credit portfolio of banks has risen sharply, especially among banks in the euro...

Home bias is a perennial feature of international capital markets. We review various explanations of this puzzling phenomenon highlighting recent developments in macroeconomic modelling that incorporate international portfolio choices in standard two-country general equilibrium models. We refer...