We develop a measure of systemic stress for the Italian financial markets (FCI-IT) that aggregates information from five major segments of the whole financial system, i.e. the money market, the bond market, the equity market, the foreign exchange market and the market for stocks of financial...

We critically review the state of the art in macro stress testing, assessing its strengths and weaknesses. We argue that, given current technology, macro stress tests are ill-suited as early warning devices, ie as tools for identifying vulnerabilities during seemingly tranquil times and for...

We show that fund-specific return skewness is associated with managerial skill and future hedge fund performance. Specifically, skewness in fund returns reflects managerial skill in avoiding large drawdowns. Using a new measure of investment skill that accounts for this managerial ability, we...

The accurate forecast of the foreign currencies exchange rates at the ultra high frequency electronic trading in the foreign currencies exchange markets is a main topic of our research: 1) the present state of the foreign currencies exchange markets in Asia, Europe and North America; 2) the...

A general consensus in the literature is that financial analysts make optimistic forecasts. That is, they tend to underreact to negative but overreact to positive information. In this study, we invoke this idea to provide an explanation for the distress risk puzzle, the phenomenon that high...

Using a novel equity lending dataset, this paper is the first to show that expected returns strongly and negatively predict future equity lending fees. In comparing two expected return measures, I find that a rational expected return has stronger predictive power of future short selling activity...

Prior research finds that sell-side analysts are generally willing partners with company management in facilitating the consistent meeting or beating of earnings expectations. We examine analysts who demonstrate the opposite behavior: issuing an unusually optimistic earnings forecast at the end...

There is considerable evidence that machine learning algorithms have better predictive abilities than humans in various financial settings. But, the literature has not tested whether these algorithmic predictions are more rational than human predictions. We study the predictions of corporate...

The price of gold is influenced by a wide range of local and global factors such as commodity prices, interest rates, inflation expectations, exchange rate changes and stock market volatility among others. Hence, forecasting the price of gold is a notoriously difficult task and the main problem...