Is there information in the commonly used indicators of country risk for expected global fixed income returns and volatility? We examine the information content in publicly available measures of political, financial and economic risk. We find that these ex-ante measures contain important...

Investors face a number of challenges when seeking to estimate the prospective performance of a long-only investment in commodity futures. For instance, historically, the average annualized excess return of individual commodity futures has been approximately zero and commodity futures returns...

People are more willing to bet on their own judgments when they feel skillful or knowledgeable (Heath and Tversky, 1991). We investigate whether this 'competence effect' influences trading frequency and home bias. We find that investors who feel competent trade more often and have more...

This paper provides a global asset pricing perspective on the debate over the relation between predetermined attributes of common stocks, such as ratios of price-to-book-value, cash-flow, earnings, and other variables to the future returns. Some argue that such variables may be used to find...

The emergence of new equity markets in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Mideast and Africa provides a new menu of opportunities for investors. These markets exhibit high expected returns as well as high volatility. Importantly, the low correlations with developed countries' equity markets...

The Federal Reserve Bank has the ability to change the money supply and to shape the expectations of market participants through their open market operations. These operations may amount to 20% of the day's volume and are concentrated during the half hour known as quot;Fed Time.quot; Using...

We survey 384 financial executives and conduct in depth interviews with an additional 23 to determine the factors that drive dividend and share repurchase decisions. Our findings indicate that maintaining the dividend level is on par with investment decisions, while repurchases are made out of...

We survey 401 financial executives, and conduct in-depth interviews with an additional 20, to determine the key factors that drive decisions related to performance measurement and voluntary disclosure. The majority of firms view earnings, especially EPS, as the key metric for an external...

This paper conducts powerful new tests of whether debt can mitigate the effects of agency and information problems. We focus on emerging market firms for which pyramid ownership structures create potentially extreme managerial agency costs. Our tests incorporate both traditional financial...

Previous studies have identified predetermined variables that have some power to explain the time series of stock and bond returns. This paper shows that loadings on the same variables also provide significant cross-sectional explanatory power for stock portfolio returns. These loadings are...