The last three decades brought mounting evidence regarding the cross-sectional predictability of country equity returns. The studies not only documented country-level counterparts of well-established stock-level anomalies, such as size, value, or momentum, but also demonstrated some unique...

We propose a new decomposition of the realized covariance matrix into components based on the signs of the underlying high-frequency returns. Under an asymptotic setting in which the sampling interval goes to zero, we derive the asymptotic properties of the resulting realized semicovariance...