We investigate the impact of universal banks on the performance and the risk of affiliated companies in an unregulated environment with booming financial markets. For a unique sample of 129 Belgian companies listed in the period 1905-1909, we find that universal bank affiliation had a positive...

Statistical population moments may be finite or infinite. Determining whether certain moments of a population are finite or not based on a finite sample turns out to be a very daunting and difficult task. If one assumes stock returns to behave according the sum stable law, characteristic...

This paper revisits some recently found evidence in the literature on the cross-section of stock returns for a carefully constructed dataset of euro area stocks. First, we find evidence of a negative cross-sectional relation between extreme positive returns and average returns after controlling...

Some years ago, Crack and Ledoit (1996) discovered a strikingly geometric structure when plotting US stock returns against themselves. Since this pattern, in which lines radiating from the origin pop up, resembles the navigating tool it was named “Compass Rose”. Although authors differ in...

The original Panjer recursion of the CreditRisk+ model is said to be unstable and therefore to yield inaccurate results of the tail distribution of credit portfolios. A much-hailed solution for the flaws of the Panjer recursion is the saddlepoint approximation method. In this paper we show that...

Corporate bonds expose the investor to credit risk, which will be reflected in the credit spread. Based on the EMU Broad Market indices, we study the inter-temporal stability of the covariance and correlation matrices of credit spread changes. Within a multivariate framework, the Box and...

Despite the wide acceptance of return-based style analysis, the method has several limitations. One important drawback is the underlying assumption that the style exposures do not vary over time. In general, little attention was devoted to examining whether this hypothesis is acceptable,...