This paper investigates the impact of news media sentiment on financial market returns and volatility in the long-term. We hypothesize that the way the media formulate and present news to the public produces different perceptions and, thus, incurs different investor behavior. To analyze such...

This paper investigates the impact of news media sentiment on financial market returns and volatility in the long-term. We hypothesize that the way the media formulate and present news to the public produces different perceptions and, thus, incurs different investor behavior. To analyze such...

We estimate the risk and expected returns of private equity using market prices of publicly traded funds of funds holding unlisted private equity funds and publicly traded private equity funds participating directly in private equity transactions. Based on the performance of these two types of...

We show that average excess returns during the last two years of the presidential cycle are significantly higher than during the first two years: 9.8 percent over the period 1948-2008. This pattern in returns cannot be explained by business-cycle variables capturing time-varying risk premia,...

Islamic equity funds (IEFs) differ fundamentally from conventional equity funds since Muslims are prohibited to invest in certain companies/sectors and pay or receive interest. This paper analyzes the risk and return characteristics of a sample of 145 IEFs over the period 2000 to 2009. Our...

We study the effects of the reform of the system of severance payments (TFR) of Italian employees on the cost and the access to credit for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The most direct consequence of the reform is to reduce in the long run the amount of liquid assets available to...

We study the relation between the credit cycle and macro-economic fundamentals in an intensity-based framework. Using rating transition and default data of U.S. corporates from Standard and Poor's over the period 1980 to 2005 we directly estimate the credit cycle from the micro rating data. We...

Deviations from normality in financial return series have led to the development of alternative portfolio selection models. One such model is the downside risk model, whereby the investor maximizes his return given a downside risk constraint. In this paper we empirically observe the...

This paper analyzes the performance and risk-return characteristics of three major emerging art markets: Russia, China, and India. According to three national art market indices, built by hedonic regressions based on auction sales prices, the geometric annual returns are 10.00%, 5.70%, and...

The art market has seen a sustained growth over the last years, but participation has been reserved for just a few investors. The paper proposes to overcome this problem by introducing a call option on an art index which is derived from one of the most comprehensive data sets of art market...