We exploit a unique dataset of country-specific military expenditures and construct a proxy for international instability, measured as the growth of the global military expenditure to GDP ratio, to capture political tensions and international conflicts. Using the market indices of 44 countries,...

This paper estimates global bad and good uncertainties from monthly data on industrial production from a large set of countries. Bad and good uncertainties have opposite effects on macro aggregates and stock returns. An increase in bad uncertainty adversely impacts both, while an increase in...

We investigate the pricing of market volatility risk as a risk factor – the innovation risk and as a characteristic risk – the level risk. We find that the pricing of the country-level (local) market volatility risk factor is not robust across 21 developed markets and that the global market...

We explore the impact of delisting on the performance of the momentum trading strategy in Australia. We employ a new dataset of hand-collected delisting returns for all Australian stocks and provide the first study outside the U.S. to jointly examine the effects of delisting and missing returns...

We find, unlike earlier studies, that there is no rise in the market betas of stocks that enter the S&P 500 index when the estimated factor model is that of Fama and French (1993). We also find that SMB and HML factor betas decline after the stocks are added to the index. This decline is...

We study whether asset-class risk dynamics can help explain the predominantly negative stock-bond return relation and movements in the term-structure's slope over 1997-2011. Using option-derived implied volatilities to measure risk, we find: (1) the negative stock-bond return relation largely...

Based on data until the mid 2000s, oil price changes were shown to predict international equity index returns with a negative predictive slope. Extending the sample to 2015, we document that this relationship has been reversed over the last ten years and therefore has not been stable over time....

We document a significant positive relation between earnings announcement idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns in the 10-day window before future earnings announcements. The average of risk-adjusted return differences between stocks with the highest earnings announcement idiosyncratic...

This paper uses the volatility surface data from options contracts to document a strong, robust, and positive cross-sectional relation between risk-neutral skewness (RNS) and subsequent stock returns. The differential return between high and low RNS stocks amounts to 0.17% per week....

In the framework of small-scale agent-based financial market models, the paper starts out from the concept of structural stochastic volatility, which derives from different noise levels in the demand of fundamentalists and chartists and the time-varying market shares of the two groups. It...