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...

We show that in recent years global factor models have been catching up significantly with their local counterparts in terms of explanatory power (R2) for international stock returns. This catch-up is driven by a rise in global factor betas, not a rise in factor volatilities, suggesting that the...

In this paper, we develop characteristic-based asset-pricing models for international stocks. We price stocks using passive portfolios created based on observable characteristics: market capitalization, book-to-market, prior-year return, growth of total assets, and operating profitability, each...

Although real integration conceptually plays an important role for the comovement of international equity markets, documenting this link empirically has proven challenging. We construct a new dataset of theory-guided, relevant measures of bilateral trade in final and intermediate goods and...

Although real integration conceptually plays an important role for the comovement of international equity markets, documenting this link empirically has proven challenging. We construct a new dataset of theory-guided, relevant measures of bilateral trade in final and intermediate goods and...

This literature overview conducts a systematic study of how the climate related risks from global warming may affect financial markets. The climate related risk is divided into three subcategories, the environmental uncertainty, the economic climate risk and the climate policy risk, which all of...

Financial intermediaries often provide guarantees that resemble out-of-the-money put options, exposing them to tail risk. Using the U.S. life insurance industry as a laboratory, we present a model in which variable annuity (VA) guarantees and associated hedging operate within the regulatory...

We study the economic sources of stock-bond return comovement and its time variation using a dynamic factor model. We identify the economic factors employing structural and non-structural vector autoregressive models for economic state variables such as interest rates, (expected) inflation,...

Despite a large and growing theoretical literature on flights to safety, there does not appear to exist an empirical characterization of flight-to-safety (FTS) episodes. Using only data on bond and stock returns, we identify and characterize flight to safety episodes for 23 countries. On...

We apply causality extraction (CE) algorithms on more than 36,000 articles from 2 major financial newspapers (WSJ, FT) and three major newswires (DJ, MNI Market News, Reuters) over the extended period 1980-2020 to shed light on the fundamental triggers of flights to safety. Our CE algorithm...