Stricter derivative margin requirements have increased the demand for liquid collateral but euro area investment funds which use derivatives extensively have been reducing their liquid asset holdings. Using transaction-by-transaction derivatives data, we assess whether the current levels of...

This paper presents a model for stress testing investment funds, based on a broad worldwide sample of primary open-end equity and bond funds. First, we employ a Bayesian technique to project the impact of macro-financial scenarios on country-level portfolio flows worldwide that are constructed...

Does leverage drive investor flows in bond mutual funds? Leverage can increase fund returns in good times, but it can also magnify investors' losses and their response to bad performance. We study bond fund flows to provide new evidence for the link between mutual fund leverage and financial...

The purpose of this paper is to study the compensation for inflation risks priced in sovereign bond yields. And we do so by modelling the time-varying dynamics of asset returns and inflation, and then estimating the cost of hedging inflation risks from the perspective of a well diversified...

The goal of this paper is to analyze predictability of future asset returns in the context of model uncertainty. Using data for the euro area, the US and the UK, we show that one can improve the forecasts of stock returns using a model averaging approach, and there is a large amount of model...

Corporate bond returns in the major developed economies increase with risk, as measured by maturity and ratings. From a pricing perspective, we find little to no evidence against the World CAPM model, where the market consists out of equity, sovereign and corporate bonds. However, from a factor...

We measure the commonality in hedge fund returns, identify its main driving factor and analyze its implications for financial stability. We find that hedge funds' commonality increased significantly from 2003 until 2006. We attribute this rise mainly to the increase in hedge funds' exposure to...

We examine international stock return comovements using country-industry and country-style portfolios as the base portfolios. We first establish that parsimonious risk-based factor models capture the covariance structure of the data better than the popular Heston- ouwenhorst (1994) model. We...

This study presents empirical evidence on the long-run motives for holding euro area money by focusing on the role of equity and labour markets. Equity positively affects money demand through wealth effects, as equities are a significant store of household wealth and thus part of a financial...