This paper presents a parsimonious model for forecasting and analysing euro area house prices and their interrelations with the macroeconomy. A quarterly vector error correction model is estimated over 1970-2009 using supply and demand forces central to the determination of euro area house...

Using bilateral data on international equity and bond flows, we find that the prediction of the International Capital Asset Pricing Model is partially met and that global equity markets might be more integrated than global bond markets. Moreover, over the turbulent 1998-2001 period characterised...

We study the effects of low short-term interest rates on the optimal portfolio allocation in Markowitz portfolios and Risk parity portfolios. We propose a measure of Portfolio Instability, gauging the amount of optimal portfolio shifts needed to respond to exogenous shocks to the expected risk...

Corporate bond returns in the major developed economies increase with risk, as measured by maturity and ratings. From a pricing perspective, we find little to no evidence against the World CAPM model, where the market consists out of equity, sovereign and corporate bonds. However, from a factor...

The goal of this paper is to analyze predictability of future asset returns in the context of model uncertainty. Using data for the euro area, the US and the UK, we show that one can improve the forecasts of stock returns using a model averaging approach, and there is a large amount of model...

This paper studies to what extent the experiences of households shape their willingness to take financial risks. It follows the methodology of Malmendier and Nagel (2011) and applies it to a novel data set on household finances covering euro area households. We show that experienced stock market...

We propose a new measure of time-varying tail risk that is directly estimable from the cross section of returns. We exploit firm-level price crashes every month to identify common fluctuations in tail risk across stocks. Our tail measure is significantly correlated with tail risk measures...

This paper investigates whether global investors are over or under exposed towards the euro area and the role of home bias and institutions at home in shaping this exposure. According to a simple benchmark from standard portfolio theory, euro area investors - in particular those from euro area...

Variables with strong marginal explanatory power in cross-section asset pricing regressions typically show less power to produce increments to average portfolio returns, for two reasons. (i) Adding an explanatory variable can attenuate the slopes in a regression. (ii) Adding a variable with...

Negative monetary policy rates are associated with a particular friction because the remuneration of retail deposits tends to be floored at zero. We investigate whether this friction affects banks' reactions when the policy rate is lowered to negative levels, compared to a standard rate cut in...