A curious seasonal anomaly found in finance is the turn of the month effect, where the daily mean return of stock market at the end of a month and beginning of a month is significantly higher than the average daily return of all the days of a month. There have been evidences that certain months...

This paper develops an international asset-pricing model with defaultable firms and governments that demonstrates how sovereign credit risk in Europe affects US equity market prices. The risk of a sovereign debt crisis is a threat to economic growth that reduces the value of international...

Using novel measures of politics-policy uncertainty we document predictable variation in stock market returns across countries. Country characteristics and existing global and local risk factors do not account for such predictability, leading to large abnormal returns, up to 15% per annum. We...

Law and politics had a significant impact on stock market development in Germany between 1870 and the beginning of World War II. IPOs can be a bellwether for stock market development and nearly 1100 were carried out on the Berlin Stock Exchange during this period. Regulatory changes occurring in...

This paper studies the impact of regulation on IPO markets using historical data. Regulatory interventions have different effects on the development of public equity markets under different conditions. Studying the whole population of 879 Italian IPOs from the unification of Italy (1861) through...

This article investigates the effects of governmental activity (turnover and color) on stock returns in France which suffered 150 different governments between 1871 and 2008. An appointment ends an uncertainty: when a government is appointed the average monthly stock price return is three times...

What type of crisis is generated when debt increases? We study the Spanish debt evolution in the 19th and 20th centuries by introducing currency and stock-market crises in the Reinhart and Rogoff (2011) framework. We find their same results for the determinants of banking and debt crises but...

This study examines how terrorist attacks affect stock returns, the differences in the reaction of stock returns among different sectors and the differences in the reaction among different stock markets. The study focuses on the terrorist attacks that took place in New York City (NYC) on 11...

The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 was the most devastating worldwide health threat since the 1918-1919 Spanish flu. Panel regression analysis for ten countries suggests that European and US stock markets reacted significantly, and negatively, to the surging death rates that were seen during the...

We study the effects of stock market volatility on risk-taking and financial crises by constructing a cross-country database spanning up to 211 years and 60 countries. Prolonged periods of low volatility have strong in-sample and out-of-sample predictive power over the incidence of banking...