Large institutional investors own an increasing share of equity markets in the U.S. The implications of this development for financial markets are still unclear. The paper presents novel empirical evidence that ownership by large institutions predicts higher volatility and greater noise in stock...

In most countries, equity is a cheap source of funding for a country's largest financial institutions. On average, the stocks of the top 10% financial companies in a country account for over a quarter of total market capitalization, but these stocks earn returns that are significantly lower than...

We study the link between the profitability of momentum strategies and firm size, drawing on an extensive dataset covering 14 stock markets across the globe. International momentum profitability is markedly higher in medium-size than in big stocks. Momentum premia are considerably diminished by...

We show that in recent years global factor models have been catching up significantly with their local counterparts in terms of explanatory power (R2) for international stock returns. This catch-up is driven by a rise in global factor betas, not a rise in factor volatilities, suggesting that the...

Although real integration conceptually plays an important role for the comovement of international equity markets, documenting this link empirically has proven challenging. We construct a new dataset of theory-guided, relevant measures of bilateral trade in final and intermediate goods and...

Using a novel and comprehensive dataset, we provide the first systematic study of liquidity in the foreign exchange (FX) market. Contrary to common perceptions, we find significant variation in liquidity across exchange rates, substantial costs due to FX illiquidity, and strong commonality in...

Hedge funds significantly reduced their equity holdings during the recent financial crisis. In 2008Q3-Q4, hedge funds sold about 29% of their aggregate portfolio. Redemptions and margin calls were the primary drivers of selloffs. Consistent with forced deleveraging, the selloffs took place in...

This paper shows that FED policy announcements lead to a significant increase in international co-movement in the cross-section of equity and particularly sovereign CDS market. The effect is strongest for emerging markets, when the FED relaxes unconventionary monetary policies, and for countries...

The authors assess the performance of the real-time diagnostic, openly presented to the public on the website of the Financial Crisis Observatory (FCO) at ETH Zurich, of the bubble regime that developed in Chinese stock markets since mid-2014 and that started to burst in June 2015. The analysis...

Oil price changes fail to predict asset returns because they are too noisy. We construct an oil trend factor that filters out noise and provide evidence that it predicts bond risk premia well. This result holds in developed and emerging countries, both in sample and out of sample. Notably, the...