The economy of the European Union has not recovered from the impact of the economic and financial crisis. Growth rates remain low and investment activity is weak. This questions current economic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union, known as austerity. In opposition to fiscal contraction...

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro-variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance, and that countryspecific mutual funds provide...

The eurozone has a single short-term nominal interest rate, but monetary policy conditions measured by either real short-term interest rates or Taylor rule residuals varied substantially across countries in the period from 2003-2010. We use this cross-country variation in the (local) tightness...

The eurozone has a single short-term nominal interest rate, but monetary policy conditions measured by real short-term interest rates varied substantially across countries in the period 2003 - 2010. We use this cross-country variation in the (local) tightness of monetary policy to examine its...

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance, and that country-specific mutual funds...

This paper aims to empirically verify whether an individual European investor can enhance the diversification of his/her portfolio of financial assets by implementing an equity market neutral strategy. The analysis takes into consideration a typical European investor who has roughly diversified...

In this article, we introduce a new return-based measure of active portfolio management, i.e. country-shifting activity, which determines changes in the country exposures of funds. We relate country-shifting activity to the popular activity measure “tracking error” and compare the abilities...