This paper investigates the impact of surprises associated with monthly macroeconomic news releases on Treasury-bond yields, by paying particular attention to the moment at which the information is published in the month. Implementing an event study on intraday data, we show that (i) the main...

After years of low macroeconomic volatility since the early eighties, well documented and referred to as the Great Moderation period in the literature, the 2008-2009 worldwide recession adversely impacted output levels in most of advanced countries. This Great Recession period was characterized...

While often criticized, independence remains the ultimate criterion for evaluating board composition, whether for regulators or shareholder activists. In this study, we examine the relationship between board independence and firm operating performance in a panel of French listed companies,...

The aim of this paper is to investigate oil price shocks' effects and their associated transmission channels on global imbalances. To this end, we rely on a Global VAR approach that allows us to account for trade and Financial interdependencies between countries. Considering a sample of 30...

Using Consensus Economics survey data on JPY/USD and GBP/USD exchange rate expectations for the 3- and 12-month horizons over the period November 1989 – December 2012 we first show that expectations fail to unbiasedness tests and do not exhibit a learning process towards rationality. Our...

Since 2000, child mortality has dramatically decreased in Africa. Based on an econometrical analysis over 45 sub-Saharan African countries, this paper analyses the determinants of such evolution, and shows that urbanization, sanitation improvement and GDP growth per capita played a critical role...

The paper examines the rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) as a new source of financing investment worldwide and, more specifically, tries to get a better understanding of SWFs from Middle East which accounted in 2013 for 35 percent of overall assets managed by them, with the bulk of them...

This paper introduces a kernel-based nonparametric inferential procedure to test for Granger-causality in distribution. This test is a multivariate extension of the kernel-based Granger-causality test in tail-event introduced by Hong et al. (2009) and hence shares its main advantage, by checking...

This paper analyzes the influence of successive crises, including the recent European sovereign debt crisis, on banks’ equity returns for 11 countries. Our data span the period December 14th 2007-March 8th 2013 that encompasses different episodes of economic and financial turmoil since the...

This paper studies the strategic interactions between two electricity generators, the first producing with a \traditional" technology and the second employing a \renewable" technology characterized by the random availability of capacity due to the intermittency of its power source. The...