This paper provides a broad empirical examination of the major currencies' roles in international capital markets, with a special emphasis on the first year of the euro. A contribution is made as to how to measure these roles, both for international financing as well as for international...

The unconventional shocks and non-linear dynamics behind the high volatility of financial markets present a challenge for the implementation of macroprudential policy. This paper introduces two of these unconventional shocks, news shocks about future fundamentals and regime changes in global...

In an analytically tractable model of the global economy, we calculate the Pareto improvement where a country experiencing a favourable supply side shock consumes more against expected future output and spreads the risk by selling shares. With capital inflows to finance the 'New Economy'...

We investigate the predictive ability of financial and macroeconomic variables for German stock and bond returns using a battery of performance metrics in addition to measures of superior predictive accuracy to identify the ‘best' models. We also examine whether combination forecasts provide...

This paper compares the ability of alternate performance measures to support investment selection in ten euro area stock markets. The performance ratios used in the paper are grouped in two main categories. One category comprises the performance ratios using risk measures which do not separate...

While the enlargement of the Euro area to new countries has reduced the average return correlation among member countries, the financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis have led to an increase in stock return correlation among old members. We find that EMU core countries portfolio...

Diversification of financial securities is considered a substantial element of portfolio risk. In this context, the construction of an optimal portfolio is an ongoing concern for portfolio managers. This study measures the risk-reward tradeoffs linked to the stock indexes of Germany, Spain,...

This study uncovers a cross-border financial diversification motive related to goods and services trade. Using the IMF CPIS panel data set for a broad set of country pairs and for the period 2001-2012, I find empirical evidence that the share of equity in a bilateral portfolio decreases with...

We provide new international evidence for a monetary policy liquidity transmission channel in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Eurozone. The central banks of these countries are, with a different degree, able to soften the economic downward spiral after an unexpected arrival of a...

A great proportion of stock dynamics can be explained using publicly available information. The relationship between dynamics and public information may be of nonlinear character. In this paper we offer an approach to stock picking by employing so-called decision trees and applying them to XETRA...