This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...

We study the economic sources of stock-bond return comovement and its time variation using a dynamic factor model. We identify the economic factors employing structural and non-structural vector autoregressive models for economic state variables such as interest rates, (expected) inflation,...

We examine international stock return comovements using country-industry and country-style portfolios as the base portfolios. We first establish that parsimonious risk-based factor models capture the covariance structure of the data better than the popular Heston- ouwenhorst (1994) model. We...

We use intraday data to compute weekly realized variance, skewness, and kurtosis for equity returns and study the realized moments' time-series and cross-sectional properties. We investigate if this week's realized moments are informative for the cross-section of next week's stock returns. We...

This paper examines the factors that affect inflows – outflows of capital in bond mutual funds that operated in the Greek market during the period 1997-2005. Investors in bond mutual funds do not seek for high gross returns in order to determine their investment decisions in contrast with...

Extending previous work on mutual fund pricing, this paper introduces the idea of modeling the conditional distribution of mutual fund returns using a fat tailed density and a time-varying conditional variance. This approach takes into account the stylized facts of mutual fund return series,...

In the context of an international portfolio diversification problem, we find that small capitalization equity portfolios become riskier in bear markets, i.e. display negative co-skewness with other stock indices and high co-kurtosis. Because of this feature, a power utility investor ought to...

This paper examines continuous-time models for the S&P 100 index and its constituents. We find that the jump process of the typical stock looks significantly different than that of the index. Most importantly, the average size of a jumps in the returns of the typical stock is positive, while it...

We show that the stock market pricing the presidential margin of victory in a nonlinear concave fashion, with a higher price for medium than slight or crushing victories. We conjecture that the margin of victory reflects president confidence and the ability to execute policies. A small margin...

We study how expectations of fund flows causally affect fund performance by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in the Australian pension system where an unexpected policy change temporarily allowed fund withdrawals from a pre-specified date in the future. Using fractions of young members,...