In countries with highly-developed financial systems bank portfolios have high exposure, directly or indirectly, to the real estate sector. Changes in the value of real estate can have a potentially significant impact on the default risk of banks and on their profitability as a result of this...

This paper investigates the impact of international sporting and cultural events on national stock markets. We study market reaction to the announcements of the selected country hosting the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, the World Football Cup, the European Football Cup and World and...

This paper looks at the cross-section of stock returns for the particular case of emerging markets. For each of 21 emerging markets I investigate the role of a set of a priori specified factors in the cross-section of returns, and subsequently assess whether the important factors are common. I...

This paper provides evidence on abnormal returns of Portuguese privatization public offerings for the period from 1989 to 2001. Previous empirical studies report the existence of underpricing for privatized firms in the short-run and positive abnormal returns in the long run. This study explores...

The proper identification of the risk variables that explain the cross section of returns in emerging markets has many and far-reaching implications for both companies and investors. We examine this risk-return relationship by focusing on three families of models, over 25 years of data, and over...

We test for herding by Portuguese mutual funds over the period of 1998 to 2000. We employ the (herding) measure of trading suggested by Lakonishok et al. (1992). We find strong evidence of herding behavior for Portuguese mutual funds. Furthermore, our results suggest that the level of herding is...

This study examines the influence of country and industry factors on the cross-sectional variance and correlation structure of returns. I use new data on emerging markets' stocks obtained from the Emerging Markets Data Base. I find that emerging markets' returns are mainly driven by country...

We document the patterns of market-wide and firm-specific volatility in the Portuguese stock market over the 1991-2005 period and test several explanations for the behavior of firm-level idiosyncratic volatility. Unlike previous studies we find no evidence of a statistically significant rise in...