A major obstacle for research in international asset pricing and corporate finance has been a lack of reliable and publicly available data on international common risk factors and portfolios. To address this gap, we provide a step-by-step description of how appropriately screened data from...

The analysis of volatility in financial markets has become a first rank issue in modern financial theory and practice: Whether in risk management, portfolio hedging, or option pricing, we need to have a precise notion of the market's expectation of volatility. Much research has been done on the...

Demand is growing for a better understanding of how assets are priced in countries outside of the U.S. While financial data are available for many firms world-wide, it is important to have a reliable and replicable method of constructing high-quality systematic risk factors from these data. This...

Based on daily VDAX data this paper analyzes the factors governing the movements of implied volatilities of options on the German stock index DAX. Using Principal Components Analysis over the sample period from 1996 to 1997, we derive common factors representing "shift" and "curvature" of the...