As stock market indexes are not tradeable, the importance and trading volume of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) cannot be understated. ETFs track and attempt to replicate the performance of a specific index. Numerous studies have demonstrated a strong relationship between the S&P500 Composite Index...

The recent and rapidly growing interest in biofuel as a green energy source has raised concerns about its impact on the prices, returns and volatility of related agricultural commodities. Analyzing the spillover effects on agricultural commodities and biofuel helps commodity suppliers hedge...

We plot aggregated daily stock returns with absolute value less than x against x and show empirically that this produces a typical spoon-shaped pattern which indicates a special type of asymmetry which has not been discussed before. This pattern disappears when individual returns are averaged; it...

Bad contagion, the downside component of contagion in international stock markets, has negative implications for financial stability. I propose a measure for the occurrence and severity of global contagion that combines the factor-model approach in Bekaert et al. (2005) with the model-free or...

Using a stylized two-period model we compare portfolio solutions from two local solution approaches - the approach of Judd and Guu (2001) and the approach of Devereux and Sutherland (2010, 2011) - with the true nonlinear portfolio solution.

We analyze the impact of the pro-Russian conflict on stock returns in Russia and the Ukraine during the period November 21, 2013 to September 29, 2014. We utilize a newly created indicator for the degree of (de-)escalation based on an Internet search for conflict-related news. We find that...

We study the informational channel of financial contagion in the laboratory. In our experiment, two markets with correlated fundamentals open sequentially. In both markets, subjects receive private information. Subjects in the market opening second also observe the history of trades and prices...

We study the link between the profitability of momentum strategies and firm size, drawing on an extensive dataset covering 14 stock markets across the globe. International momentum profitability is markedly higher in medium-size than in big stocks. Momentum premia are considerably diminished by...

We show that in recent years global factor models have been catching up significantly with their local counterparts in terms of explanatory power (R2) for international stock returns. This catch-up is driven by a rise in global factor betas, not a rise in factor volatilities, suggesting that the...

This paper examines the short-term dynamics, macroeconomic sensitivities, and longer-term trends in the variances and covariances of national equity market index daily returns for eleven countries in the Euro currency zone. We modify Colacito, Engle and Ghysel's Mixed Data Sampling Dynamic...