Annuities are perceived as being illiquid financial instruments, and this has limited their attractiveness to consumers and their inclusion in financial models. However, short positions in annuities can be replicated using life insurance and debt, permitting long positions in annuities to be...

This study examines whether the ‘managerial entrenchment’ problem resulting from the separation of ownership and control between the shareholders and managers of Chinese firms motivates the decision to purchase property insurance. Managerial entrenchment is measured using a principal...

Corporate leverage among emerging market firms went up considerably after the 2007–09 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We investigate how the increased emerging market corporate leverage in the post-GFC period (2010–15)impacted the underlying credit risk, compared to the pre-GFC (2002–2006)...

To estimate foreign exchange (FX) cash flow exposure, one may choose between direct and indirect regression approaches, where the direct approach uses accounting-based cash flow data and the indirect approach uses equity returns as a cash flow proxy. The indirect approach typically includes one...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between balance sheet size and leverage (i.e., leverage pro-cyclicality) and the pro-cyclicality of systemic risk using three systemic risk measures such as DCoVaR (Adrian & Brunnermeier, 2016), MES (Acharya et al., 2017), SRISK (Brownlees & Engle,...

This paper examines the interaction between the equity index option market and sovereign credit ratings. S&P and Moody's signals exhibit strong impact on option-implied volatility while Fitch's influence is less significant. Moody's downgrades reduce the market uncertainty over the rated...

I consider extreme returns for the stock and bond markets of 14 EU countries using two classification schemes: One, the univariate classification scheme from the previous literature that classifies extreme returns for each market separately, and two, a novel multivariate classification scheme...

We develop a framework that allows a multivariate system of long memory processes to be conditional on specific regimes to investigate the effects of credit rating agencies' (CRAs) sovereign credit re-ratings on European stock and currency return distributions over the period from 1996 to 2012....

This paper investigates volatility contagion across U.S. and European stock markets during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crisis (ESDC). Using a sample of international implied volatility indices on daily changes, I explore asymmetric conditional correlation...

We provide original results on national and global stock market liquidity and its interaction with macro-economic variables for six of the G7 economies, namely: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and UK, building on the methodology and on the US evidence by Naes et al. (2011). Using a number...