We are the first to demonstrate the decline in the cross-sectional predictability of country and industry returns in recent years. We examine 53 anomalies in country and industry indices from 64 markets for the years 1973–2018. The profitability of the strategies has significantly decreased...

This study presents the results from a comprehensive out-of-sample test of long-run returns following mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Using a unique sample from 23 frontier markets of almost 800 transactions conducted during the years 1992 to 2016, we implement both cross-sectional tests and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted a remarkable impact on stock market volatility around the globe. Can vaccination programs revert these adverse effects? To answer this question, we scrutinize daily data from 66 countries from January 1st, 2020, to February 18th, 2021. We provide convincing...

We explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the term structure of interest rates. Using data from developed and emerging countries, we demonstrate that the expansion of the disease significantly affects sovereign bond markets. The growth of confirmed cases significantly widens the term...

Does past stock price reaction to pandemics contain information about future returns? To answer this, we estimate firm exposure to a pandemic index representing global concerns of infectious diseases. We demonstrate that such a pandemic beta reliably predicts the cross-section of future stock...

What protects travel and leisure companies from a global pandemic, such as COVID-19? To answer this question, we investigate data on over 1,200 travel and leisure companies in 52 countries. We consider 80 characteristics, such as company financial ratios, macroeconomic variables, and government...

We investigate the impacts of new COVID-19 infections on stock returns within China’s unique zero-COVID policy framework. We document a remarkable negative pattern: a COVID-19 outbreak within a city adversely affects the performance of local firms in a nonlinear fashion. This effect...

The recent increase in passive investment products has provided investors with easy access to international markets. The basic motivation of this paper is to offer new tools to investors who want to allocate assets across countries. This study investigates the performance of equity country...

Do past alphas predict future country and industry returns? Examination of equity indexes from 51 stock markets between 1973 and 2018 allows us to demonstrate new return patterns in the cross-section of country and industry returns. Past short-term (long-term) alphas positively (negatively)...

The perspective of behavioral finance is that anomalies in the cross-section of returns are driven by mispricing that arises from investor irrationality that cannot be easily arbitraged away. In this study, we examine the implications of this for international government bond markets. Using data...