The continuing creation of portfolio insurance applications as well as the mixed research evidence suggests that so far no consensus has been reached about the effectiveness of portfolio insurance. Therefore, this paper provides a performance evaluation of the stop-loss, synthetic put and...

It is commonly agreed that the term spread and stock returns are useful in predicting recessions. We investigate whether interest rate and stock market volatility play an additional role as recession indicators. Both risk-return analysis and the theory of investment under uncertainty provide a...

This paper decomposes the explained part of the CDS spread changes of 31 listed euro area banks according to various risk drivers. The choice of the credit risk drivers is inspired by the Merton (1974) model. Individual CDS liquidity and other market and business variables are identified to...

This paper revisits some recently found evidence in the literature on the cross-section of stock returns for a carefully constructed dataset of euro area stocks. First, we confirm recent results for U.S. data and find evidence of a negative cross-sectional relation between extreme positive...

This paper decomposes the explained part of the CDS spread changes of 31 listed euro area banks according to various risk drivers. The choice of the credit risk drivers is inspired by the Merton (1974) model. Individual CDS liquidity and other market and business variables are identified to...

We re-examine dividend growth and return predictability evidence using 165 years of data from the Brussels Stock Exchange. The conventional wisdom holds that time-varying dividend yield is predominately explained by changes in expected returns and that expected dividend growth is only weakly...

We investigate monthly returns of Belgian stocks listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange in the period 1838-2010. Our sample covers all stocks in the market over the entire period. Stock returns strongly depend on dividend income: real capital appreciation tends to be negative. Stocks were less...

We investigate corporate bond returns for the period 1838-1939 by using a unique new sample from the Brussels Stock Exchange. The value-weighted annualized total rate of return, net of defaults and taxes, is 4.33% in nominal terms and 2.81% in real terms. Estimates of average returns show that...

In this paper, we introduce a completely new and unique historical dataset of Belgian stock returns during the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. This high-quality database comprises stock price and company related information on more than 1500 companies. Given the extensive...