We examine the roles of rational and behavioural factors in explaining long-run premiums/discounts on closed-end funds, using evidence on equity funds from the US and UK. Although the processes by which fund prices converge towards long-run premiums or discounts are similar in the two countries,...

Contrary to the theoretical principle that higher risk is compensated with higher expected return, the literature shows that low-risk stocks outperform high-risk stocks. Using a large-scale household dataset, we provide an explanation for this puzzling result that the anomalous negative...

Construction of efficient portfolios is reliant on understanding the correlation between assets. If correlations change markedly during times of economic turmoil then investors are exposed to greater than desired risk levels at the most inopportune time. We examine the linkages between global...

Geopolitical events are widely reported in the press and may influence the risk premium demanded by investors in addition to demand and supply of energy resources. Using the daily geopolitical risk index of Caldara and Iacoviello (2018), we demonstrate that geopolitical risk plays an important...

Using a novel collection of market characteristics from 40 countries, this paper test competing explanations behind five major anomalies classified in Hou, Xue, and Zhang (2015): momentum, value-growth, investment, profitability, and trading frictions. Results show that anomaly returns highly...

This paper investigates the performance and characteristics of survivor stocks in the S&P 500 index. Using both in-sample and out-of-sample comparisons, survivor stocks outperformed this market index by a considerable margin. Relative to other S&P 500 index companies, survivor stocks tend to be...

Stock market fundamentals would not seem to meaningfully predict returns over a shorter-term horizon --- yet some economic agents could be particularly concerned about severe tail risk, rather than just mean returns. Motivated by present value logic, and the literature's suggestion that required...

We study the relation between equity market uncertainty and the informational efficiency of U.S. equity prices, proxied by the SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF. Using the Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) equity market uncertainty index, we document a negative relation between market uncertainty and...

The oil price volatility index (OPVI) is a direct and more accurate measure of oil price uncertainty. The significance of the crude oil prices volatility index is used in this paper to examine the effects of crude oil uncertainty on the aggregate and market returns in various economic sectors....

We discuss the finding that cross-sectional characteristic based models have yielded portfolios with higher excess monthly returns but lower risk than their arbitrage pricing theory counterparts in an analysis of equity returns of stocks listed on the JSE. Under the assumption of general...