Purportedly consistent with "risk parity" (RP) asset allocation, recent studies document compelling "low risk" trading strategies that exploit a persistently negative relation between Sharpe ratios (SRs) and maturity along the U.S. Treasury (UST) term structure. This paper extends this evidence...

Since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began announcing its policy decisions in 1994, U.S. stock returns have on average been more than thirty times larger on announcement days than on other days. Surprisingly, these abnormal returns are accrued before the policy announcement. The excess...

A small but ambitious literature uses affine arbitrage-free models to estimate jointly U.S. Treasury term premiums and the term structure of equity risk premiums. Within this approach, this paper identifies the parameter restrictions that are consistent with a simple dividend discount model,...

Many of the empirical investigations in behavioural finance are focused on US markets; with their focus on investor psychology, biases and heuristics these explanations may well not be robust when exposed to different countries, races and cultures. This paper investigates a popular explanation...

We investigate the return premium on stocks with high earnings quality using a broad and recent global dataset covering all developed markets from 7/1988 to 6/2012. We find that a simple strategy that is long stocks with high earnings quality and short stocks with low earnings quality produces a...

In this paper, I show that a sizable component of emerging market sovereign yield spreads is due to factors other than default risk such as liquidity. I estimate the non-default component of the yield spreads as the basis between the actual credit default swap (CDS) premium and the hypothetical...

Political uncertainty drives markets. Among macroeconomic forces, it is one of the fewfactors that systematically affect most assets - hence it qualifies as a state variable in the senseof the ICAPM and should carry a risk premium. We employ static and conditional factormodels using data in...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

While existing asset pricing studies focus on macroeconomic variables to predict stock market risk premium, we find that an aggregate index of corporate activities has substantially greater predictive power both in- and out-of sample, and yields much greater economic gain for a mean-variance...

This paper finds that a zero-investment strategy that goes long (short) in the highest (lowest) quintiles of firm-specific risk earns overall positive excess returns across twenty-one emerging markets. Interestingly, in previous studies such returns were found to be negative for the US and...