The past decade has witnessed a surge in private, volunteer activity across the globe, generating an optimistic belief in the potential of "civil society" in "filling" the niches where both the state and markets have failed. While this has stirred a burgeoning academic interest in the third...

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,...

Recent studies have proposed a large set of powerful characteristics-based factors in the stock market. This study examines the pricing of these factors using portfolios that are formed by directly sorting stocks based on their exposure to these factors. These beta-sorted portfolios have very...

Global stock markets react positively when different phases of human clinical trials on COVID-19 vaccine candidates begin. The average increase in stock market returns on day one of the trials is 15.2 basis points, and this estimate is both economically and statistically significant. The market...