According to the Balassa-Samuelson e¤ect, productivity gains in the domestic tradable sectorraise the relative price of domestic non-tradables causing deviations from the purchasing powerparity. In the literature, the Balassa-Samuelson e¤ect is typically invoked to explain the Penne¤ect,...

This paper documents a relation between the shareholder base and payout policy. Consistentwith the idea that the shareholder base is related to the cost of external financing we find thatfirms with small shareholder bases have lower payout levels and maintain higher cash holdingsthan firms with...

This papers studies the CDS-bond basis, i.e. a measure of price discrepanciesbetween CDS and bonds spreads, for a sample of investment-graded US rms. Resultsshow that during the 2007/09 nancial crisis the basis was time varying and negativelycorrelated to: the \Libor-OIS" spread, a proxy for the...

We study the relation between order imbalance and past returns and firm characteristics and testa number of hypothesis including the disposition effect, momentum and contrarian trading, taxlossselling and flight-to-quality hypothesis. These hypotheses make predictions about investors’buy or...

Pairwise stock correlations increase by 27% on average when stock returns arenegative. It is trading activity in small stocks that leads to higher correlationswhen returns are negative. We provide evidence consistent with the hypothesisthat co-ordinated selling by retail investors drives this...

We examine active retail mutual funds and institutional products with a mandate to invest ininternational equity markets between 1991 and 2009. Using global and regional factor models,we find no reliable evidence of alphas in the aggregate or on average. The right tail of thedistribution...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities:[...]

Most time series models used in econometrics and empirical finance are estimated withmaximum likelihood methods, in particular when interest centers on density and Value{at{Risk (VaR) prediction. The standard maximum likelihood principle implicitly placesequal weight on each of the observations...

We study a number of large international military conflicts sinceWorld War II where we establish a news analysis as a proxy for theestimated likelihood that the conflict will result in a war. We findthat in cases when there is a pre-war phase, an increase in the warlikelihood tends to decrease...

We analyze numerically the superreplication problem and the associatedhedging strategy in an illiquid binomial market. We prove theexistence of an optimal feedback strategy for European and barrier optionsand compute it numerically by means of a dynamic programmingprinciple. We exhibit that the...