Using an international sample from 1982 to 2008, we investigate the performance of global and 50 country-specific (28 developed and 22 emerging) fundamentally weighted portfolios compared to capitalization-weighted portfolios. First, we establish that superior performance of domestic portfolios...

Recent empirical research shows that low volatility stocks outperform high volatility stocks around the world. This study documents that the volatility effect is associated with the quality of the firm using a large sample of international stocks. First, adding a quality factor to the...

Using a large international sample of 35 developed and emerging markets, we analyze whether Islamic indices exhibit a different performance to conventional benchmarks. While there is no compelling evidence of performance differences in robust Sharpe ratio tests and after controlling for market...

The maximum daily return over the previous month (MAX) of Bali et al. (2011) is a strong and significant predictor of future stock returns in non-U.S. equity markets. Once it is controlled for MAX in the cross-section of average returns, the puzzling negative idiosyncratic volatility-return...

As a consequence of the losses resulting from the speculative activities of the stock trader Jérôme Kerviel of Société Générale, the DAX saw a drop of over 7% on 21 January 2008. This is the date on which the highest daily loss was recorded after issuance of the first endless leverage...

We suggest a joint optimization model for a firm’s hedging and leverage decisions that helps to establish an integrated framework for value creation. Rather than artificially separating the two interrelated parts of the firm’s financial policy, we treat both corporate decision variables as...

This paper develops a theory of a firm’s hedging decision with endogenous leverage. In contrast to previous models in the literature, our framework is based on less restrictive distributional assumptions and allows a closed-form analytical solution to the joint optimization problem. Using...

We investigated the stock price behavior of public pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies upon approval of a drug by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Using event study methodology, we examine the reaction caused by the approval, seperating it from the asset price movements caused by...