We study the role of firm ambiguity on stock price reaction to earnings announcements. By using the firm's variance risk premium (VRP) prior to earnings news arrivals as a proxy for firm-level information ambiguity, we provide evidence that this “micro” form of ambiguity has a significant...

Recent empirical finance literature reports a sizable equity premium on two types of days. The first is under Democratic administrations. The second is on scheduled macroeconomic news announcement days. The current study unifies the two strands of literature by documenting that statistically...

We examine the reaction of world equity markets to the 1997 Asian Crisis. Correlations across the markets increased dramatically during the economic crisis but only during a relatively short period around the crisis. After the crisis, the benefits of international diversification improved...

Using the Markov regime-switching model, this paper examines factor loadings on macroeconomic, market sentiment and other variables that may explain North American investment-grade and high-yield credit default swap indices (CDX) over the period 2003–2011. In both crisis and tranquil market...

We use a general Markov switching model to examine the relationships between returns over three different asset classes: financial assets (US stocks and Treasury bonds), commodities (oil and gold) and real estate assets (US Case-Shiller index). We confirm the existence of two distinct regimes: a...

Emerging market currencies tend to jump together, thus intensifying short-term risk, whereas developed market currency jumps and cojumps are much less prevalent. Emerging market currency jumps are considerably more severe, especially during crisis periods. Jumps represent a majority of emerging...