Ethical investments have become increasingly popular over the past years. Ethical funds restrict their investment based on environmental, social and/or ethical criteria. Prior research on the performance of ethical versus non-ethical funds yields mixed results. This paper investigates the...

Measuring risk in the stock market context is one of the key challenges of modern finance. Despite of the substantial significance of the topic to investors and market regulators, there is a controversy over what risk factors should be used to price the assets or to determine the cost of...

We provide evidence on the policy risk of social security in Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia by computing the changes in the social security wealth induced by the pension reforms undertaken since the 1990s. Methodologically we follow upon McHale' (2001) study of selected reforms in G7...

We develop a four-factor model intended to capture size, value, and credit rating transition patterns in excess returns for a panel of predominantly mid- and large-cap entities. Using credit transition matrices and rating histories from 48 US issuers, we provide evidence to support a...

We examine how extreme market risks are priced in the cross-section of asset returns at various horizons. Based on the frequency decomposition of covariance between indicator functions, we define the quantile cross-spectral beta of an asset capturing tail-specific as well as horizon-, or...

This paper introduces residual shape risk as a new subclass of energy commodity risk. Residual shape risk is caused by insufficient liquidity of energy forward market when retail energy supplier has to hedge his short sales by a non-exible standard baseload product available on wholesale market....

We examine time-varying explanatory power of realized moments on subsequent bond futures excess returns using more than 12 years of high-frequency data from U.S. and German sovereign bond markets. We detect realized volatility and realized kurtosis to carry valuable information for next-day...

This paper studies the extent to which monetary policy may affect banks' perception of credit risk and the way banks measure risk under the internal ratings-based approach. Specifically, we analyze the effect of different monetary policy indicators on banks' risk weights for credit risk. We...

Several alternative news-based Economic Policy Uncertainty indices have been developer for Spain and a few other European countries. These alternative indices differ in the selection of keywords, newspaper coverage, and a scaling factor that is used to calculate the EPU index from the raw news...

The news-based Economic Policy Uncertainty indices (EPU) of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom display discernible trends that can be found neither in other European countries nor in other uncertainty indicators. Therefore, we replicate the EPU index of European countries and show that...