We use a unique and comprehensive data set on open-end real estate funds in Germany to study a liquidity crisis that hit this industry between 2005 and 2006. Since this industry is comparably unregulated our data set permits us to contrast competing explanations of liquidity crisis. We find that...

Technical trading strategies assume that past changes in prices help predict future changes. This makes sense if the past price trend reflects fundamental information that has not yet been fully incorporated in the current price. However, if the past price trend only reflects temporary pricing...

Despite a large and growing theoretical literature on flights to safety, there does not appear to exist an empirical characterization of flight-to-safety (FTS) episodes. Using only data on bond and stock returns, we identify and characterize flight to safety episodes for 23 countries. On...

The real estate investment trust (REIT) industry experienced a liquidity crisis resulting from reduced access to credit commitments as banks were restoring their balance sheets during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Employing generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH)...

We show that managerial overconfidence, which has been found to influence a number of corporate financial decisions, also affects corporate risk management. We find that managers increase their speculative activities using derivatives following speculative gains, while they do not reduce their...

This paper investigates a sample of 27 OECD countries to test whether national elections induce higher stock market volatility. It is found that the countryspecific component of index return variance can easily double during the week around an Election Day, which shows that investors are...

Alan Greenspan's paper (March 2010) presents his retrospective view of the crisis. His theme has several parts. First, the housing price bubble, its subsequent collapse and the financial crisis were not predicted either by the market, the FED, the IMF or the regulators in the years leading to...

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

The estimation of expected security returns is one of the major tasks for the practical implementation of the Markowitz portfolio optimization. Against this background, in 1992 Black and Litterman developed an approach based on (theoretically established) expected equili-brium returns which...

The most relevant practical impediment to an application of the Markowitz portfolio selection approach is the problem of estimating return moments, in particular return expectations. We analyze the consequences of using return estimates implied by analysts' dividend forecasts under the explicit...