We consider impulse response functions to study the impact of both return and volatility on the correlation between international equity markets. Using data on the US (as the reference country), Canada, the UK and France equity indices, empirical evidence shows that without taking into account...

We investigate the implications of ambiguity aversion for retained earnings. We show that firms can eliminate distortions such as underinvestment by paying out earnings that maximizes shareholder wealth. We show that there is a negative relationship between ambiguity and retained earnings and...

How the correlation between equity returns behaves during market turmoils has been an issue of discussion in the international finance literature. Some research suggest an increase of correlation during volatile periods [Ang and Bekaert, 2002], while others argue its stability [Forbes and...

This paper proposes a new nonparametric test for conditional independence, which is based on the comparison of Bernstein copula densities using the Hellinger distance. The test is easy to implement because it does not involve a weighting function in the test statistic, and it can be applied in...

We use high-frequency data to study the dynamic relationship between volatility and equity returns. We provide evidence on two alternative mechanisms of interaction between returns and volatilities: the leverage effect and the volatility feedback effect. The leverage hypothesis asserts that...

Copulas are extensively used for dependence modeling. In many cases the data does not reveal how the dependence can be modeled using a particular parametric copula. Nonparametric copulas do not share this problem since they are entirely data based. This paper proposes nonparametric estimation of...

We study the asymptotic properties of the Bernstein estimator for unbounded density copula functions. We show that the estimator converges to infinity at the corner. We establish its relative convergence when the copula is unbounded and we provide the uniform strong consistency of the estimator...