Strategies that overweight low beta stocks and underweight high beta stocks earn positive alphas. Price noise is known to affect high beta stocks, hence, noise trading can be expected to significantly affect the performance of these strategies. I study the impact of flows between bond and equity...

Forward-looking metrics of uncertainty based on options-implied information should be highly predictive of equity market returns in accordance with asset pricing theory. Empirically, however, the ability of the VIX, for example, to predict returns is statistically weak. In contrast to other...

This study investigates the impact of flows between bond and equity funds on investment factors over the period 1984-2015. It determines contemporaneous mispricing effects and a statistical reversal relation between these flows and both legs of the investment factor. The statistical reversal...

Mandelbrot and the Smile It is a well-documented empirical fact that index option prices systematically differ from Black-Scholes prices. However, previous research provides inconclusive results whether the observed volatility smile could be explained by a discretetime dynamic model of stock...

The record-breaking prices observed in the art market over the last three years raise the question of whether we are experiencing a speculative bubble. Given the difficulty to determine the fundamental value of artworks, we apply a right-tailed unit root test with forward recursive regressions...

We identify crucial events during the European sovereign debt crisis and investigate their impact on the euro currency. In particular, we analyse how specific announcements related to vulnerable Eurozone member states, European Central Bank (ECB) actions, and credit rating downgrades affect the...

This paper sets the background for the Special Issue of the Journal of Empirical Finance on the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. It identifies the channel through which risks in the financial industry leaked into the public sector. It discusses the role of the bank rescues in igniting the...

The record-breaking prices observed in the art market for the last three years have rais the question of whether we are experiencing a speculative bubble. Given the difficulty to determine the fundamental value of artworks, we apply a right-tailed unit root test with forward recursive...

This paper explores the impacts of key policy actions by US and European authorities on stock returns of systemically important banks in Europe and US around the subprime crisis. We find that the US policy announcements had a stronger impact on the European and US banking industry than the...

In this study, we empirically investigate and evaluate various approaches to structurally assess credit risk using a panel of European banking groups. We consider not only the standard approaches in the literature, but also include models that allow the asset volatility to be stochastic and...