Recent research suggests that the power law is one of the most universal laws in nature and it also seems to work quite fine in economics and finance. In this paper we show that the power law explains extremely well the relationship between the value of broad-based market indices and their...

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of recently proposed asset pricing models which extend the standard preference specification by a reference level of consumption. The novelty is that we use a broad cross-section of test assets, which provides a level playing field for a comparison to...

This study focuses on the diversification benefits of the most developed equity markets of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). To evaluate these benefits of diversification we use so-called spanning tests based on a stochastic discount factor approach and estimated by General Methods of Moments...

Asset price processes are completely described by information processes and investors´ preferences. In this paper we derive the relationship between the process of investors´ expectations of the terminal stock price and asset prices in a general continous time pricing kernel framework. To...

Residual income valuation is based on the assumption that the clean surplus relation holds. As pointed out by Ohlson (2000), among others, the standard clean surplus relation is frequently violated. Moreover, standard residual income valuation models rest on the implicit assumption that future...

We study the performance of conditional asset pricing models in explaining the German cross-section of stock returns. Our test assets are portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market as in the paper by Fama and French (1993). Our results show that the empirical performance of the Capital Asset...

The confidence that financial markets are able to discipline the debt behaviour of governments is not very high. Therefore, the Stability and Growth Pact has been implemented as an institutional constraint to substitute for the market mechanism. With the weakening of the Pact, market discipline...

This paper analyzes the effect of environmental regulation on stock returns (as a measure of economic performance) for German energy corporations. By using event study methodology, we consider the last minute victory of the acting government in the 2002 German federal elections to the Lower...

Starting from an information process governed by a geometric Brownian motion we show that asset returns are predictable if the elasticity of the pricing kernel is not constant. Declining [Increasing] elasticity of the pricing kernel leads to mean reversion and negatively autocorrelated asset...

This paper presents and compares several time-series models for returns of broadbased stock indices. These models nest a nonlinear asymmetric GARCH (NGARCH) model as a special case. Some of these models are empirically motivated ad-hoc specifications others are derived from a representative...