Asset returns are not correlated with the business cycle but are primarily caused by the economic cycles. To validate this claim, economic cycles are first rigorously defined, namely the classical business cycle and the growth cycle, better known as the output gap. The description of different...

Recent studies show that volatility-managed equity portfolios realize higher Sharpe ratios than portfolios with a constant notional exposure. We show that this result only holds for “risk assets”, such as equity and credit, and link this to the so-called leverage effect for those assets. In...

This is the first paper in the DSGE literature to match key business cycle moments and long-run equity returns in a small open economy with production. These results are achieved by introducing four modifications to a standard real business cycle model: (1) borrowing and lending costs are...

In this paper, I have investigated the out of sample forecast performance for a case study on the determination of the nominal exchange rate for USD vis-à-vis IN¬R under VEC, VAR (in first difference) and Bayesian VAR specification with the help of set of economic theories. The forecast...

This study aims to examine the mechanism that governs the significant positive relationship between aggregate earnings changes and contemporaneous changes in the market risk premium. Prior studies point to this relationship but do not provide a clear explanation for it. Therefore, we divide...

This paper applies the mean-variance portfolio optimization (PO) approach and the stochastic dominance (SD) test to examine preferences for international diversification versus domestic diversification from American investors’ viewpoints. Our PO results imply that the domestic diversification...

We construct investor sentiment indices for six major stock markets and decompose them into one global and six local indices. In a validation test, we find that relative sentiment is correlated with the relative prices of dual-listed companies. Global sentiment is a contrarian predictor of...

In this paper we find that Fama and French factors can explain the future behavior of three macroeconomic variables of the Brazilian economy: GDP, industrial production and inflation. The results show that these three factors explain the future behavior of the macroeconomic variables with a...

This paper explores the effect of feedback trading on expected returns and international portfolio allocation using stock market data for the US and Latin America. Autocorrelation in monthly returns are shown to vary with volatility as suggested by the Shiller-Sentana-Wadhwani feedback trading...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) predicts a positive relation between risk and return, but empirical studies find the actual relation to be flat, or even negative. This paper provides a broad overview of explanations for this ‘volatility effect' that have been proposed in different...