In this study, we analyze the effects of sovereign credit rating reviews on national stock market performances in GIIPS and BRIC countries during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis of 2009-2013. Through an event study, we test the Null Hypothesis that cumulative abnormal returns on national...

This paper examines the relative performance of small-caps vs. large caps surrounding periods of peaks and troughs of economic activity, and reexamines the relationship between the small firm anomaly and the business cycle. Small-cap firms outperform large caps over the year subsequent to an...

The shift of perspective from a national basis to a Euro area basis, inevitably induced by EMU, has led member countries to a parallel shift from equity home bias to equity Euro bias. We interpret this evidence by means of a standard mean-variance portfolio selection model modified in order to...

The aim of this paper is to present and briefly analyse the provisions of the recent (24 May 2018) European Commission's proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council, whose objective is to lay down a general framework for sovereign bond-backed securities (SBBSs). It is...

The literature on corporate financing is quite extensive. However, researchers have so far not shed light on the IPO determining factors in Europe as a whole. This paper addresses three main questions observing more than 9000 IPOs performed during a period from 1991 to 2014. First, the...

We examine the impact of sovereign downgrades on European firms for equity markets and credit default swap (CDS) markets during the period 2009 to 2012. We find evidence of spillover effects, where sovereign downgrades lead to negative abnormal stock returns and positive abnormal CDS spread...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

The present article contains a brief but comprehensive overview of the development of the Capital Markets Union (CMU) project in the EU to further deepen EU capital markets’ integration. After the Introduction, it first discusses the Commission’s 2015 CMU Action Plan and its follow-up,...

We show that aggregate insider trading (AIT) in the S&P 500 is a reliable predictor of the U.S. equity premium, while AIT outside the S&P 500 seems to be uninformative. Aggregate trading of S&P 500 insiders outperforms a broad set of well-established predictors considering in- and out-of-sample...