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...

A growing literature uses the Russell 1000/2000 reconstitution event as an identification strategy to investigate corporate finance and asset pricing questions. To implement this identification strategy, researchers need to approximate the ranking variable used to assign stocks to indexes. We...

We show how distributions can be reduced to low-dimensional scenario trees. Applied to intertemporal distributions, the scenarios and their probabilities become time-varying factors. From S&P 500 options, two or three time-varying scenarios suffice to forecast returns, implied variance or...

We develop a theory of arbitrage-free dispersion (AFD) that characterizes the testable restrictions of asset pricing models. AFD measures Jensen's gap in the cumulant generating function of pricing kernels and returns. It implies a wide family of model-free dispersion constraints, which extend...

We find that the degree and dynamics of sovereign bond market integration across 21 developed and 18 emerging countries is significantly heterogeneous. We show that better spanning can significantly enhance market integration through dissipating local risk premiums. Integration of the sovereign...

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...

We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that are poorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but have strong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global factors are jointly significant predictors of bond returns,...

We show that in a consumption-based asset-pricing model with hyperbolic discounting leading to dynamically inconsistent time preferences value premium increases nonlin-early with the degree of discounting and thus affects cross section of returns. To test our model empirically, we relate the...

We examine time varying integration of developed (DM) and emerging (EM) market government bonds. Although we find an upward trend for most countries and maturity bands, we do observe reversals and negative trends among both DMs and EMs and for some maturities during the financial crisis. We...