Measuring the impact of political risk on investment projects is one of the most vexing issues in international business. One popular approach is to assume that the sovereign yield spread captures political risk and to augment the project discount rate by this spread. We show that this approach...

Given the cross-sectional and temporal variation in their liquidity, emerging equity markets provide an ideal setting to examine the impact of liquidity on expected returns. Our main liquidity measure is a transformation of the proportion of zero daily firm returns, averaged over the month. We...

We introduce a new, market-based and forward looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country's U.S. dollar debt and an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions,...

We identify flight-to-safety (FTS) days for 23 countries using only stock and bond returns and a model averaging approach. FTS days comprise less than 2% of the sample, and are associated with a 2.7% average bond-equity return differential and significant flows out of equity funds and into...

We distinguish between ”good” and ”bad” carry trades constructed from G-10 currencies. The good trades exhibit higher Sharpe ratios and sometimes positive return skewness, in contrast to the bad trades that have both substantially lower Sharpe ratios and highly negative return skewness....