In this paper we develop a dynamic model for integer counts to capture the dis- creteness of price changes for financial transaction prices. Our model rests on an autoregressive multinomial component for the direction of the price change and a dynamic count data component for the size of the...

This paper analyzes the effect of non-constant elasticity of the pricing kernel on asset return characteristics in a rational expectations model. It is shown that declining elasticity of the pricing kernel can lead to predictability of asset returns and high and persistent volatility. Also,...

The article tests for a random walk in European equity style indexes. After briefly introducing the efficient market hypothesis, equity styles in general and the used statistical techniques (Variance Ratio Test and modified Rescaled Range Test) it is shown that a random walk in European equity...

Is real investment fully determined by fundamentals or is it sometimes affected by stock market misvaluation? We introduce three new tests that: measure the reaction of investment to sales shocks for firms that may be overvalued; use Fama-MacBeth regressions to determine whether overinvestment...

We empirically analyze the determinants of Initial Public Offering (IPO) underpricing using panel data for 29 countries over the period 1988-2005. Our hypotheses stress the importance of institutional and legal factors in explaining cross-country variations. We find that increased protection of...

The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bi-variate...

This brief exposition suggests that the Federal Reserve System temporarily guarantee a lower bound on stock prices in order to escape the current combination of liquidity trap and credit crunch. It shortly discusses reasons for this measure, consequences, and some alternatives. It is meant as a...

We explore the impact of mortgage securitization on the international diversification of macroeconomic risk. By making mortgage-related risks internationally tradeable, securitization contributes considerably to better international consumption risk sharing: we find that countries with the most...

This paper investigates the magnitude and the main determinants of share price reactions to buy-back announcements of German corporations. For our comprehensive sample of 224 announcements that took place between May 1998 and April 2003 we find average cumulative abnormal returns around -7.5%...

We examine the performance of volatility models that incorporate features such as long (short) memory, regime-switching and multifractality along with two competing distributional assumptions of the error component, i.e. Normal vs Student-t. Our precise contribution is twofold. First, we...