Using UK equity index data, this paper considers the impact of news on time varying measures of beta, the usual measure of undiversifiable risk. The results suggest that beta depends on two sources of news - news about the market and news about the sector. The asymmetric effect in beta is...

This paper considers the relationship between traded volume and volatility. We employ short sales data to discriminate between transactions that close existing long positions and transactions that establish new short positions. We test for, and where appropriate, incorporate non-linearity and...

There is widespread evidence that the volatility of stock returns displays an asymmetric response to good and bad news. This article considers the impact of asymmetry on time-varying hedges for financial futures. An asymmetric model that allows forecasts of cash and futures return volatility to...

This paper tests a version of Barro`s tax-smoothing model, which assumes intertemporal optimization by a government seeking to minimize the distortionary costs of taxation, using Pakistan and Sri Lankan data for 1956-95 and 1964-97, respectively. The empirical results indicate that Pakistan`s...

This impressive Handbook presents the quantitative techniques that are commonly employed in empirical finance research together with real-world, state-of-the-art research examples.

We study the effects of growth volatility and inflation volatility on average rates of output growth and inflation for post-war US data. Our results suggest that increased growth uncertainty is associated with significantly lower average growth, while higher inflation uncertainty is...

Recent research documents the importance of uncertainty in determining macroeconomic outcomes, but little is known about the transmission of uncertainty across such outcomes. This paper examines the response of uncertainty about inflation and output growth to shocks documenting statistically...

Recent empirical work suggests a predictive relationship between stock returns and output growth. We employ quarterly data from a panel of 27 countries to test whether stock returns as useful in predicting growth. Unlike previous research, our approach allows for the possible non-linear effect...