We extend probit modeling to forecast a bear stock market in the United States and eight major foreign stock markets. In general, we find that the U.S. yield spread contains more important market-timing information than does the home-country yield spread for profitable market timing. At a 35%...

Much of the empirical work on hedging exchange rate exposure in portfolios of financial assets has used a unitary hedge ratio, or a currency overlay. Alternatively, the currencies themselves can be treated as assets and the position in them optimized. This study empirically tests whether the ex...

In this paper, we examine the pattern of historical evolution of international earnings-to-price ratios for a sample of 17 developed markets over the period 1980-2008. Using a measure of distance between earnings-to-price ratios of international stock markets, we find that earnings-to-price...

This paper studies the cross-currency and temporal variations in the random walk behavior in exchange rates. We characterize currencies with relatively large investment flows as investment intensive and conjecture that the more investment intensive a currency is, the closer its exchange rate...

We propose a new investment strategy employing "factor funds" to systematically enhance the mean-variance efficiency of international diversification. Our approach is motivated by the increasing evidence that size (SMB), book-to-market (HML), and momentum (MOM) factors, along with the market...

Consistent with predictions from the psychology literature, we find that stock prices co-move more (less) in culturally tight (loose) and collectivistic (individualistic) countries. Culture influences stock price synchronicity by affecting correlations in investors׳ trading activities and a...

Using a simple numeraire currency-independent metric to measure distances between currencies, it is found that for most of the 25 sampled floating currencies, excluding the US dollar and euro, there has been a noticeable decrease in the ratio of a currency’s distance from the euro to its...

In this paper, we examine the behavior of stock prices of individual firms with different bond ratings surrounding the October market crash of 1987 and therefrom make inferences about the significance of bankruptcy costs borne by stockholders. The key findings are as follows: Immediately...

We examine the contribution of cross-listings to price discovery for a sample of Canadian stocks listed on both the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) and a U.S. exchange. We find that prices on the TSE and U.S. exchange are cointegrated and mutually adjusting. The U.S. share of price discovery ranges...

In this paper, we show (i) that the risk-return characteristics of our sample of 17 developed stock markets of the world have converged significantly toward each other during our study period 1974-2007, and (ii) that this international convergence in risk-return characteristics is driven mainly...