Companies whose names contain the words “America(n)” or “USA” earn positive abnormal returns of about 6% per annum during World War II, the Korean War, and the War on Terrorism. These abnormal returns are not realized immediately upon the outbreak of each of the wars but are accumulated...

Using daily observations from 448 actively managed funds, we employ the methodology in Bollen and Busse (2001) in order to assess the ability of fund managers to time systematic risk factors. We first construct synthetic portfolios in order to obtain the empirical distribution of timing...

Countries whose citizens have liberal ideals are less biased toward domestic equity. Data from 30 countries suggests that economic as well as social liberalism is associated with proportionally higher foreign equity holdings. A one standard deviation increase in the level of economic (social)...

Using daily return data from 448 actively managed mutual funds over a recent 9-year period, we look for persistence, over two consecutive quarters, in the ability of funds to select individual stocks and time the market. That is, we decompose overall fund performance into excess returns...

This paper puts the PIN variable (Probability of INformation-based trading) to test. We find that for a large set of stocks, the PIN variable is lower (albeit insignificantly) in the periods before earnings announcements dates than in the periods after earnings announcements dates. This is...

Using unique transactions data for individual high-frequency trading (HFT) firms in the UK equity market, we examine if the trading activity of individual HFT firms is contemporaneously and dynamically correlated with each other, and what impact this has on price efficiency. We find that HFT...

We study the impact of the recent global financial crisis on CHAPS, the United Kingdom’s large-value payments system. Core infrastructures functioned smoothly throughout the crisis and settlement banks continued to meet their payment obligations. However, payments data show that in the two...