We examine the pricing of tail risk in international stock markets. We find that the tail risk of different countries is highly integrated. Introducing a new World Fear index, we find that local and global aggregate market returns are mainly driven by global tail risk rather than local tail...

Theories of systemic risk suggest that financial intermediaries' balance-sheet constraints amplify fundamental shocks. We provide supportive evidence for such theories by decomposing the U.S. dollar risk premium into components associated with macroeconomic fundamentals and a component...

Geopolitical events can impact volatilities of all assets, asset classes, sectors and countries. It is shown that innovations to volatilities are correlated across assets and therefore can be used to measure and hedge geopolitical risk. We introduce a definition of geopolitical risk which is...

Assessments of investors' risk appetite/aversion stance via indicators often yields results which seem unsatisfactory (see e.g. Illing and Aaron (2005)). Understanding how such indicators work therefore seems essential for further improvements. The present paper seeks to contribute to this...

We show that internationally diversified portfolios carry sizeable political risk premia. We use a tail-risk portfolio selection model to obtain political efficient frontiers from skewed return distributions and manage political risk, and design an inference test to draw conclusions. We find...

Recent academic research predicts that (i) equity mutual funds have a systematically better performance during periods of economic downturn and (ii) investors are willing to pay high fees for funds that provide recession insurance. In this paper, we test these hypotheses using international fund...

This paper investigates dynamic currency hedging benefits, with a further focus on the impact of currency hedging before and during the recent financial crises originated from the subprime and the Euro sovereign bonds. We take the point of view of a Euro-based institutional investor who...

We compare the predictive ability and economic value of implied, realized and GARCH volatility models for 13 equity indices from 10 countries. Model ranking is similar across countries, but varies with the forecast horizon. At the daily horizon, the Heterogeneous Autoregressive model offers the...

It is well-documented that government bonds with almost identical cash flows can trade at different prices. This paper analyzes the cross-section of bond spreads across developed European countries and documents a novel result. In periods of widening credit spreads, bond spreads between new and...

The global financial crisis (2007-2009) saw sharp declines in stock markets around the world, affecting both advanced and emerging markets. In this paper we test for the existence of equity market contagion originating from the US to advanced and emerging markets during the crisis period. Using...