We introduce a new, market-based and forward looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country's U.S. dollar debt and an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions,...

Measuring the impact of political risk on investment projects is one of the most vexing issues in international business. One popular approach is to assume that the sovereign yield spread captures political risk and to augment the project discount rate by this spread. We show that this approach...

We introduce a new, market-based and forward looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country's U.S. dollar debt and an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions,...

We introduce a new, market-based and forward looking measure of political risk derived from the yield spread between a country's U.S. dollar debt and an equivalent U.S. Treasury bond. We explain the variation in these sovereign spreads with four factors: global economic conditions,...

The emergence of new equity markets in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Mideast and Africa provides a new menu of opportunities for investors. These markets exhibit high expected returns as well as high volatility. Importantly, the low correlations with developed countries' equity markets...

This paper investigates the statistical properties of high frequency nominal exchange rates and forward premiums in the context of a dynamic two-country general equilibrium model. Primary focus is on the persistence, variability, leptokurtosis and conditional heteroskedasticity of exchange rates...

We explore the different factors that drive expected returns in world markets. Our research offers two innovations. First, the introduction of the Euro currency unit greatly reduces the complexity of including foreign exchange risk in asset pricing models. We use a synthetic Euro excess return...

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility ("uncertainty"), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

It appears that volatility in equity markets is asymmetric: returns and conditional volatility are negatively correlated. We provide a unified framework to simultaneously investigate asymmetric volatility at the firm and the market level and to examine two potential explanations of the...