This paper examines the determinants of stock returns in a small open economy using an APT framework. The analysis is conducted for the Swiss stock market which has the particularity of including a large proportion of firms that are exposed to foreign economic conditions.

Demand is growing for a better understanding of how assets are priced in countries outside of the U.S.While financial data are available for many firms world-wide, it is important to have a reliable andreplicable method of constructing high-quality systematic risk factors from these data. This...

This paper serves two purposes. First, we introduce a new data set on the German stock marketwhich is publicly available to all researchers. It comprises factor returns (a market factor, asize factor, a book-to-market factor, and a momentum factor) as well as returns of portfolioswhich are...

This paper conducts a comprehensive asset pricing study based on a unique dataset for theGerman stock market. For the period 1963 to 2006 we show that value characteristics andmomentum explain the cross-section of stock returns. Corresponding factor portfolios havesignificant premiums across...

In this paper, we identify and document the empirical characteristics of the key drivers ofconvertible arbitrage as a strategy and how they impact the performance of convertible arbitragehedge funds. We show that the returns of a buy-and-hedge strategy involving taking a longposition in...

This paper contributes to the dynamic portfolio choice and transaction cost literatures by considering a multiperiod CRRA individual who faces transaction costs and who has access to multiple risky assets, all with predictable returns.(...)

The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteenGerman states (Länder) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of acapital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed incomemarket for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals that...

When assets exhibit asymmetric dependence or joint downside risk, diversificationcan fail and financial markets may be prone to systemic risk. We analyze thedependence structure of risk factors in the US economy, using both correlations anda parsimonious set of copulas. We find evidence of...

This paper reveals that the class of affine term structure models introduced by Duffie and Kan (1996) is much larger than it has been usually considered in the literature. We study "fundamental" risk factors, which represent multivariate risk aversion of the consumer volatility matrix of the...

The effect of model and parameter misspecification on the effectiveness of Gaussian hedging strategies for derivative financial instruments is analyzed, showing that Gaussian hedges in the `natural'' hedging instruments are particularly robust. This is true for all models that imply...