The recent turmoil in the financial markets has highlighted that no asset is really free of risk. Indeed, even the supposedly safest assets, namely sovereign bonds issued by developed countries, are exposed to default risk. Despite this observation most mean-variance efficiency tests are...

When a conflict breaks out, warring states' bond prices generally experience sharp declines. As military defeat may prompt the winner to ask for reparations, bonds issued by the losing party are usually even more affected. By contrast, during the Second Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902) the prices of...

Does financial globalization lead to contagion? We scrutinize linkages between international stock markets in a long historical perspective (1880-2014). Our results highlight that without globalization, contagion cannot exist. However, if cross-market correlations are very high, globalization...