Market reactions to the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) provide new insights into how real shocks and financial policies drive firm value. Initially, internationally oriented firms, especially those more exposed to trade with China, underperformed. As the virus spread to Europe and the...

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...

We show that the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a surge in the elasticity of non-financial corporate to sovereign credit default swaps in core EU countries, characterized by strong fiscal capacity. For peripheral countries with lower budgetary slackness, the pandemic had essentially no impact on...

We construct risk-neutral return probability distributions from S&P 500 options data over the decade 2003 to 2013, separable into pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis regimes. The pre-crisis period is characterized by increasing realized and, especially, option-implied returns. This translates...

This paper implements a novel model-free methodology to measure skewness risk premia in individual stocks. The methodology takes the form of a trading strategy, a skewness swap. The return on the strategy shows a significant positive skewness risk premium in individual stocks. The risk premium...

This paper empirically analyses the effect of foreign block acquisitions on the U.S. target firms' credit risk as captured by their CDS. The involvement of foreign investors leads to a significant increase in the target firms' CDS spreads. This effect is stronger when foreign owners are...

Market integration and currency risk are two main factors that distinguish international investment and financing decisions. Hence, we investigate the impact of currency factor on the dynamics of market integration. We compare integration indices estimated from conditional international asset...

Market liberalization may not result in global pricing or full market integration if implicit barriersare important. We test this proposition for 22 emerging markets using the conditional version ofErrunza and Losq (1985) model. We estimate and compare the degree of integration for stocksthat...

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...