In this paper we analyse aggregate and firm level systemic risk for US and European banks from 2004 to 2012. We observe that common systemic risk indicators are primarily driven by firm size which implies an overriding concern for “too-big-to-fail” institutions. However, smaller banks may...

Using a rich dataset of high frequency historical information we study the determinants of European sovereign bond returns over calm and crisis periods. We find that the importance of the equity risk factor varies greatly over time and crucially depends on country risk. In low risk countries,...

Most previous studies demonstrating the influential role of the textual information released by the media on stock market performance have concentrated on earnings-related disclosures. By contrast, this paper focuses on disposal announcements, so that the impacts of listed companies’...

We develop and test a parsimonious contingent claims model for cross-sectional returns of stock portfolios formed on market leverage, book-to-market equity, asset growth rate, and equity size. Since stocks are residual claims on firms' assets that generate operating cash flows, stock returns are...

By introducing operating inflexibility into the standard capital structural model, we build a two-regime model to show that the negative relation between profitability and financial leverage is not evidence against the trade-off model. Whereas firms increase their contractual operating costs...

This paper employs a probit model and a Markov switching model using information from the Conference Board Leading Indicator series to detect the turning points in four key US commercial rents series. We find that both the approaches based on the leading indicator have considerable power to...

This paper employs a unique, hand-collected dataset of exchange rates for five major currencies (the lira of Barcelona, the pound sterling of England, the pond groot of Flanders, the florin of Florence and the livre tournois of France) to consider whether the law of one price and purchasing...

Investors are now able to analyse more noise-free news to inform their trading decisions than ever before. Their expectation that more information means better performance is not supported by previous psychological experiments which argue that too much information actually impairs performance....

This paper contributes to the debate on the effects of the financialization of commodity futures markets by studying the conditional volatility of long-short commodity portfolios and their conditional correlation with traditional assets (stocks and bonds). Using several groups of trading...

Evidence suggests that rational, periodically collapsing speculative bubbles may be pervasive in stock markets globally, but there is no research that considers them at the individual stock level. In this study we develop and test an empirical asset pricing model that allows for speculative...