A simple manipulation of the cointegrated framework proposed by Lettau and Ludvigson (2001, 2004) allows to demonstrate that temporary fluctuations of the U.S. consumption-wealth ratio predict excess returns on international stock markets. This finding is the reflection of an important common,...

The decomposition of a European market return into cashflow and discount rate news components suggests that returns on European and country value portfolios react more sensitive to news about the European market return´s cashflows than the corresponding growth portfolios. This evidence is...

Cross-border asset and liability holdings allow countries to insulate their consumption streams from idiosyncratic output shocks, i.e. consumption risk sharing. More cross-border asset holdings are associated with more risk sharing. By contrast, a bank’s interconnectedness is regarded as an...

We document a consistent and robust relation between expected equity premia and common risk factors constructed on the basis of small stocks. Empirically, we show that (i) small-stock components of traditional value and momentum factors capture patterns in returns on regional and global...

Based on a vector autoregressive model (VAR), this paper shows that time variation in monthly excess returns on Swiss government bonds and stocks is predominantly driven by news of inflation and dividends, respectively. This finding is in marked contrast to US evidence which points to a more...

We explore the impact of mortgage securitization on the international diversification of macroeconomic risk. By making mortgage-related risks internationally tradeable, securitization contributes considerably to better international consumption risk sharing: we find that countries with the most...

Motivated by recent US evidence, we evaluate the predictive power of changes in the weight of large firms in the aggregate stock market ("Goliath vs David" (GVD)) for Swiss stock market returns and bond market returns. Previous research suggests that the asset return dynamics in the US and...

This paper assesses whether the global fall in inflation expectations together with increased fear of recession, the economic mechanism that drives asset prices in a model with consumption habits, help to explain the downward trajectory in nominal government bond yields and the stock price...

This working paper evaluates the economic sources of the stock market responses of 40 countries to surprises in the fed funds rate (FFR), the Fed's forward guidance (FG) and large-scale asset purchases (LSAP). We decompose stock market returns into different components reflecting investors'...