China's remarkable economic growth over the past 35 years has come at a cost, not least being a significant deterioration in its natural environment. Chinese authorities have responded to this challenge with a range of measures including the imposition of specifically targeted environmental...

We propose an instrument to measure individuals' social preferences regarding equity and efficiency behind a veil of ignorance. We pair portfolio and wealth distribution choice problems which have a common budget set. For a given bundle, the distribution over an individual's wealth is the same...

In an increasingly technology-driven economy, CEOs' innovation leadership forms an essential part of companies' human capital. We find CEOs with superior innovation leadership, measured by their proven on-the-job innovation performance, are more popular on the directorship market. Through the...

This paper motivates a novel predictor of currency returns and exchange rate changes, the lagged foreign interest rate. This variable is the dividend-to-price analogue in currency markets and its forecasting ability is incremental to established predictors. Currency-return predictability is...

In portfolio risk minimization, the inverse covariance matrix prescribes the hedge trades in which a stock is hedged by all the other stocks in the portfolio. In practice with finite samples, however, multicollinearity makes the hedge trades too unstable and unreliable. By shrinking trade sizes...

Firms with higher R&D intensity subsequently experience higher stock returns in international stock markets, highlighting the role of intangible investments in international asset pricing. The R&D effect is stronger in countries where growth option risk is more likely priced, but is unrelated to...

Motivated by a theoretical model, we examine for 43 countries whether it is policy or policy uncertainty that affects technological innovation more. Innovation activities, measured by patent based proxies, are not, on average, affected by which policy is in place. Innovation activities however,...

We document a positive and persistent relation between retail investor attention, as measured by Google search volume, and future realized stock return volatility. The relation implies a profitable option trading strategy of purchasing high attention delta-neutral straddles and selling low...

We evaluate to what extent the geographical and industry composition of the global real economy corresponds to that of public equity markets. We find that there are substantial differences between both regional and industrial composition of the real economy and equity markets. For example, the...

Conducting a Beveridge-Nelson decomposition on exchange rates reveals that the prospective interest rate differential -- the expected infinite sum of future interest rate differentials (i.e., the "prospective'') -- can help predict foreign exchange market excess returns. We find that the...