While it is commonly believed that derivative instruments are a recent invention, we document the existence of forward contracts for the sale of wool in medieval England around 700 years ago. The contracts were generally entered into by English monasteries, who frequently sold their wool for up...

The price-earnings effect has been thoroughly documented and widely studied around the world. However, it has always been calculated on the basis of the previous year’s earnings. We show that the power of the effect has until now been seriously underestimated, due to taking too short-term a...

This paper employs a unique dataset from the UK based on ten years of surveys of company directors and analysts conducted for Management Today to examine the relationship between a firm’s reputation and the returns on its shares. We find that investors who purchase stocks with reputation...

Most previous studies demonstrating the influential role of the textual information released by the media on stock market performance have concentrated on earnings-related disclosures. By contrast, this paper focuses on disposal announcements, so that the impacts of listed companies’...

This paper employs a probit model and a Markov switching model using information from the Conference Board Leading Indicator series to detect the turning points in four key US commercial rents series. We find that both the approaches based on the leading indicator have considerable power to...

This paper employs a unique, hand-collected dataset of exchange rates for five major currencies (the lira of Barcelona, the pound sterling of England, the pond groot of Flanders, the florin of Florence and the livre tournois of France) to consider whether the law of one price and purchasing...

Investors are now able to analyse more noise-free news to inform their trading decisions than ever before. Their expectation that more information means better performance is not supported by previous psychological experiments which argue that too much information actually impairs performance....

This paper contributes to the debate on the effects of the financialization of commodity futures markets by studying the conditional volatility of long-short commodity portfolios and their conditional correlation with traditional assets (stocks and bonds). Using several groups of trading...

Evidence suggests that rational, periodically collapsing speculative bubbles may be pervasive in stock markets globally, but there is no research that considers them at the individual stock level. In this study we develop and test an empirical asset pricing model that allows for speculative...

This paper uses a regime switching approach to determine whether prices in the stock, direct real estate and indirect real estate markets are driven by the presence of speculative bubbles. The results show significant evidence of the existence of periodically partially collapsing speculative...