We examine international stock return comovements using country-industry and country-style portfolios. We first establish that parsimonious risk-based factor models capture the covariance structure of the data better than the popular Heston-Rouwenhorst (1994) model. We then establish the...

We examine the pricing of aggregate volatility risk in the cross-section of stock returns. Consistent with theory, we find that stocks with high sensitivities to innovations in aggregate volatility have low average returns. In addition, we find that stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility...

We investigate the ability of several international asset pricing models to price the returns on 36 FTSE global industry portfolios. The models are the international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) the ICAPM with exchange risks, and global two-factor and three-factor Fama-French (1996, 1998)...

Straddles on individual stocks generally earn significantly negative returns. However, average at the money straddles from three days before an earnings announcement to the announcement date yield a highly significant 3.34% return. The positive returns on straddles indicate that investors...

We document strong global commonality in firm-level and aggregate idiosyncratic return variances across 23 developed markets, and develop a rational pricing model to explain the empirical pattern. We find that the global common factor of idiosyncratic return variances is highly correlated with...

With thousands of co-existing and competing platforms, the Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market experienced both high growth and high failure rate. We hand collect unique data for these P2P platforms and investigate the differences in performance and survival for platforms with and without...

Hedge fund managers' risk-taking choices are determined by their compensation structure. Most existing studies focus on how the incentive fee and the high-water mark provision affect managers' risk-taking. We build a simple model to show that managers' risk-taking is negatively related to their...

Using the monthly returns of 37,854 firms in 23 developed markets over the period 1990-2015, we document that multinational companies earn higher returns than domestic companies by 24 basis points per month. This finding is further confirmed by using a sample of 18,996 U.S. firms over the period...

We provide an easy method to identify purchases and sales initiated by retail investors using recent, widely available U.S. equity transactions data. Individual stocks with net buying by retail investors outperform stocks with negative imbalances by approximately 10 basis points over the...

Using multiple short sale measures, we examine the predictive power of short sales for future stock returns in 38 countries from July 2006 to December 2014. We find that the days-to-cover ratio and utilization ratio measures have the most robust predictive power for future stock returns in the...