The appropriate design of monetary policy in integrated financial markets is one of the most challenging areas for central banks. One hot topic is whether the rise in liquidity in recent years has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets. If strong linkages exist, the...

This paper develops an equilibrium model of speculative bubbles that can be used to explore the role of various policies in either giving rise to or eliminating the possibility of asset bubbles, e.g. restricting the use of certain types of loan contracts, imposing down- payment restrictions, and...

This paper questions traditional approaches for testing the day-of-the-week effect on stock returns. We propose an alternative approach based on the closure test principle introduced by Marcus, Peritz and Gabriel (1976), which has become very popular in Biometrics and Medical Statistics. We test...

Contributions by investor-owned companies play major roles in financing the campaigns of candidates for elective office in the United States. We look at the presidential level and analyze contributions by companies before an election and their stock market performance following US presidential...

This paper empirically examines the theoretically ambivalent relationship between socially responsible investing (SRI) and stock performance. It extends the existing literature by considering both the US and the entire European stock markets as well as by using consistent world-wide corporate...

In this paper, we examine the evolution of the S&P500 returns volatility around market crashes using a Markov-Switching model. We find that volatility typically switches into the high volatility state well before a crash and remains in the high state for a considerable period of time after the...

In this paper we examine the issue of asymmetry in the return and volatility spillover effects from the US equity market into the Canadian and Mexican equity markets. We model the conditional volatility of the returns in each of the three markets using the asymmetric power model of Ding, Granger...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

Using monthly data for the period 1953-2003, we apply a real-time modeling approach to investigate the implications of U.S. political stock market anomalies for forecasting excess stock returns. Our empirical findings show that political variables, selected on the basis of widely used model...