We investigate the risk-return trade-off on the US and European stock markets. We investigate the non-linear risk-return trade-off with a special eye to the tails of the stock returns using quantile regressions. We first consider the US stock market portfolio. We find that the risk-return...

The empirical finding of an inverse U-shaped relationship between per capita income and pollution, the so-called Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), suggests that as countries experience economic growth, environmental deterioration decelerates and thus becomes less of an issue. Focusing on the...

The focus of this paper is on the leading indicator properties of high-yield corporate spreads regarding the level of real economic activity. This is motivated by both the financial accelerator mechanism underlying business cycle fluctuations as suggested by Bernanke and Gertler (1989). We...

In this paper, we scrutinize the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns. As a novelty, the idiosyncratic volatility is obtained by conditioning upon macro-finance factors as well as upon traditional asset pricing factors. The macro-finance factors are...

We use historical data that cover more than one century on real GDP for industrial countries and employ the Pesaran panel unit root test that allows for cross-sectional dependence to test for a unit root on real GDP. At first, we find strong evidence against the unit root null. Our results seem...

This paper adopts quantile regressions to scrutinize the realized stock-bond correlation based upon high frequency returns. The paper provides in-sample and out-of-sample analysis and considers a large number of macro-?nance predictors well-know from the return predictability literature. Strong...

This paper adopts dynamic factor models with macro-fi?nance predictors to revisit the intertemporal risk-return relation in ?five large European stock markets. We identify country specifi?c, Euro area, and global factors to determine the conditional moments of returns considering the role of...

The empirical finding of an inverse U-shaped relationship between per capita income and pollution, the so-called Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), suggests that as countries experience economic growth, environmental deterioration decelerates and thus becomes less of an issue. Focusing on the...

This paper provides evidence on the causes of movements in monthly UK stock prices, examining the role of macroeconomic and financial variables in a nonlinear framework. We allow for time-varying effects through the use of smooth transition models. We find that past changes in the dividend yield...

This paper explores the methodology of regime-switching in the analysis of the income inequality-economic growth relationship. The underlying idea is that when some income determinant passes a certain threshold introduces a new relationship between inequality and income and/or income...