I examine whether or not returns on stock markets are a leading indicator for real macroeconomic developments in Austria, Japan and the USA. Further I deal with the concept of stock market efficiency, the question whether or not information from real and financial sectors of the economy is...

This paper explores the determinants of corporate failure and the pricing of financially distressed stocks using US data over the period 1963 to 2003. Firms with higher leverage, lower profitability, lower market capitalization, lower past stock returns, more volatile past stock returns, lower...

This study focuses on the diversification benefits of the most developed equity markets of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). To evaluate these benefits of diversification we use so-called spanning tests based on a stochastic discount factor approach and estimated by General Methods of Moments...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...

We explore the macro/finance interface in the context of equity markets. In particular, using half a century of Livingston expected business conditions data we characterize directly the impact of expected business conditions on expected excess stock returns. Expected business conditions...

We provide a simple and intuitive measure of interdependence of asset returns and/or volatilities. In particular, we formulate and examine precise and separate measures of return spillovers and volatility spillovers. Our framework facilitates study of both non-crisis and crisis episodes,...

A large part of the current debate on US stock price behavior concentrates on the question of whether stock prices are driven by fundamentals or by non-fundamental factors. In this paper we put forward the hypothesis that a present value model with time-varying expected returns provides an...

Hedge funds are fundamentally exposed to equity volatility, skewness, and kurtosis risks based on the systematic pattern and significant spread in alphas from the existing models that do not control for the higher-moment risks. The spread and pattern in alphas do not disappear with bootstrap...

This paper investigates whether measuring consumption risk over long horizons can improve the empirical performance of the Consumption CAPM for size and value premia in international stock markets (US, UK, and Germany). In order to account for commonalities in size and book-tomarket sorted...

The paper extends the evidence on the factors relevant for pricing stocks in emerging markets. While previous literature focused on Latin American and Asian developing markets, Central and Eastern European markets remain under-researched. By focusing on the Polish stock market, we aim to fill in...