The S&P500 or DAX30 are important benchmarks for the financial industry. The first mimics the performance of the major US on the NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ, while the second does the same for the German Prime Share sector. These and other indices describe different compositions of certain segments of...

We study the performance of many traditional and novel, text-based variables for in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting of oil spot, futures, and energy company stock returns, and changes in oil volatility, production, and inventories. After controlling for small-sample biases, we find evidence...

For nearly every major stock market there exist equity and implied volatility indices. These play important roles within finance: be it as a benchmark, a measure of general uncertainty or a way of investing or hedging. It is well known in the academic literature that correlations and higher...

The spillover effects of interconnectedness between financial assets are decomposed into both sources of shocks and whether they amplify or dampen volatility conditions in the target market. We use historical decompositions to rearrange information from a VAR which includes sources, direction...

We apply machine learning techniques and use stock characteristics to predict the cross-section of stock returns in 33 international markets. We conduct a stringent out-of-sample test to examine concerns about overfitting: the models are trained with past U.S. data and used to predict...

We examine return predictability with machine learning in 46 international stock markets. We calculate 148 stock characteristics and use them to feed a repertoire of different models. The algorithms extract predictability mainly from simple, yet popular, factor types—such as momentum,...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of market sentiment on cryptocurrency returns. To accomplish this, we use a novel dataset that captures a multitude of attitudes, moods, and emotions extracted from a vast amount of news and social media content. Our findings indicate that social media...

This paper examines how robust economic, political, and demographic variables are related to water and air pollution. Employing Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) for a cross section of up to 74 countries, 33 variables and 3 proxies for air and water pollution over a period from...

This paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country-specific variation. The empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by Fitch Ratings are...