While intuition suggests that governance and transparency at the corporate level are primordial for a country's international appeal, foreign portfolio investors appear to care first and foremost about transparency, predictability and honesty at the government level. This is, at least, what our...

In the debate whether country factors are typically more variable than sector factors, sparked off by e.g. Roll (1991) and Heston and Rouwenhorst (1994), one of the few uncontested facts is that the addition of emerging markets (EMs) does boost the ratio of country-factor variance relative to...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading> The forward puzzle is traditionally explained as the presence of a covariance-risk premium, market friction or limits to arbitrage. Recently, Liu and Sercu, working on intra-ERM rates for the DEM, presented evidence consistent with career risk considerations: portfolio managers shun...

Previous research shows that bank information production mitigates asymmetric information problems. However, this literature has ignored the concern that firms with better growth prospects are more vulnerable to bank rent extraction. This paper points out that funding competition from new equity...

We characterize the equilibrium exchange rate in a general equilibrium economy without imposing strong restrictions on the output processes, preferences, or commodity market imperfections. The nominal exchange rate is determined by differences in initial wealths the currencies of richer...

Generalizing Cooper-Kaplanis (1994), we estimate implied costs that reconcile international portfolios with InCAPM predictions. Costs depend on home- and host-country characteristics and on interactions; we estimate risk tolerance rather than pre-specifying it; and we control for currency risk,...

For the purpose of testing uncovered interest parity (UIP), rates of European currencies against the Mark offer a distinct advantage: the admissible band of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) induces statistically significant mean-reversion in weekly rates. Thus, unlike for freely floating rates,...