We investigate the impact of universal banks on the performance and the risk of affiliated companies in an unregulated environment with booming financial markets. For a unique sample of 129 Belgian companies listed in the period 1905-1909, we find that universal bank affiliation had a positive...

This paper revisits some recently found evidence in the literature on the cross-section of stock returns for a carefully constructed dataset of euro area stocks. First, we find evidence of a negative cross-sectional relation between extreme positive returns and average returns after controlling...

This paper decomposes the explained part of the CDS spread changes of 31 listed euro area banks according to various risk drivers. The choice of the credit risk drivers is inspired by the Merton (1974) model. Individual CDS liquidity and other market and business variables are identified to...

In this article, we calculate a market-weighted return index for the 20 largest stocks listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange over the period 1833–2005, based on a new, unique and high-quality database. We find that this index captures the most important stylised facts of the value-weighted...