In this Preface, we offer some analysis of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its implications for financial industry reform and research. We primarily focus on issues relating to transparency and the measurement of risk and how these are affected by management incentives that are often...

During the last decade, derivatives markets became an asset class of their own and influenced the financial landscape strongly. While the financial sector contributes positively to overall growth in many studies up the mid nineties, a positive contribution of the financial sector to economic...

We investigate the effects of financial risk cycles on business cycles, using a panel spanning 73 countries since 1900. Agents use a Bayesian learning model to form their beliefs on risk. We construct a proxy of these beliefs and show that perceived low risk encourages risk-taking, augmenting...

This paper shows that momentum trading fails to generate significant profits beyond the one-month holding period on the Warsaw Stock Exchange over the years 2002-2011. Size and value strategies are efficacious but have varying magnitudes over time: Size premium diminishes in the second...

This paper examines the liquidity, Tobin's Q, and cost of equity effects from voluntary and mandatory IFRS adoption. In contrast to prior work, we focus on the firm level heterogeneity in the economic consequences, recognising that the level of uncertainty avoidance (UAI) in a country will...

Using a large panel of firms across the world from 1991-2006, we show that the median foreign firm has lower idiosyncratic risk than a comparable U.S. firm. Country characteristics help explain variation in the level of idiosyncratic risk, but less so than firm characteristics. Idiosyncratic...

Motivated by previous studies documenting significant return and volatility effects of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the stock market, this study examines whether EPU has an effect on the dynamic conditional correlations between stock and commodity returns. Our findings point to a...

We present a novel explanation of the cross-sectional seasonality anomaly in government bond returns. The macroeconomic risk premia may accrue unevenly during the calendar year, and the pattern may be transferred to government bond prices. We decompose the seasonality strategy payoffs into...

This paper analyzes whether country-specific or foreign Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) can explain time-series variation in momentum returns in some international stock markets. First, we empirically tested three EPU index series on the return of Long-Short portfolios of momentum-based...

The calculation of the capital charge for CVA risk, as required by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, is usually rather unstable due to the volatility of CDS spreads. Since credit derivatives on single names are not very liquid, the implied adjustments in capital charges could be...