Index providers increasingly offer sustainable stock indices based on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) ratings of firms. The performance of such indices with ESG tilts is driven by the impact of the applied weighting methodology and by the ESG firm ratings. In this paper, we focus on...

Dividend payments are firm events on a recurring and predictable basis. High returns in the period between announcement-date and ex-dividend date are the main driver for the so-called dividend month premium, which are positive abnormal returns in months in which corporations are predicted to...

In recent years, various proposals have been published and discussed on overcoming the problems in evaluating fund performance based on ex-post Sharpe ratios during periods of declining markets. In particular, it has frequently been debated whether negative Sharpe ratios, which naturally occur...

The Volkswagen emissions scandal is by far the largest case of emissions cheating in automotive history and had wide-reaching consequences for the industry throughout the world. This study examines the spillover effects to competitors and suppliers following Volkswagen's public admission of...

This paper analyzes determinants of home bias in equity funds based on monthly holdings data using panel and quantile regressions. We investigate 699 equity funds, domiciled in fifteen European countries, that broadly invested in European stocks from January 2003 to December 2016. More than...

This paper introduces a return-based approach to studying a possible home bias of equity funds by estimating their exposures in their home countries. We first confirm the robustness of our approach using simulated portfolios with different proportions of domestic and foreign stocks. The...

This paper analyzes momentum patterns in the European corporate bond market. We study a broad sample of Euro-denominated investment grade and noninvestment grade bonds covering the period January 2004 to October 2016. Our empirical findings reveal that momentum is mainly concentrated among...

This study introduces an innovative approach to measuring the “style-shifting activity” (SSA) of mutual funds using daily returns. Applying our new measure to a comprehensive sample of 2631 active US equity mutual funds, we show (i) that SSA predicts future performance, especially for...

We analyze short-term reversal and medium-term momentum patterns in weekly stock returns in Europe. Focusing on raw and on stock-specific returns, our empirical results show for both return specifications i) a negative relation between weekly past returns and future returns in the short run and...

This paper studies the impact of market climate on the classic Jensen alpha (JA) of funds. We show analytically that the one-factor JA of a fund consists of i) the fund's alpha based on the assumed multi-factor model and ii) further components that are subject to market phases of factor...