This thesis will first criticize standard financial theory. The focus will be on return distributions, efficient market hypothesis and the independence of returns. Part two gives the intuition to look at markets in a different view. Namely the one proposed by B. Mandelbrot who has shown that...

The first essay examines news and the cross section of returns. Using a sentiment score provided by Thomson Reuters to measure the tone of news articles, this paper examines monthly portfolio returns constructed from information about past news articles. The sentiment score is obtained from the...

In this dissertation, I explore the impact of idiosyncratic risk on asset returns. The first essay examines how idiosyncratic risk affects the cross-section of stock returns. I use an exponential GARCH model to forecast expected idiosyncratic volatility and employ a combination of the size...

Economics

This paper provides new insight into the relationship between short sales and stock market returns using a sample of stocks sold short in Canada. Short interest is defined in relation to trading volume. The results strongly support the assertion that short sales and excess returns are...

The launch of financial reforms in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) at the beginning of the 1990s stimulated increased interest of investors and academics in the newly-born stock markets of this region. Most of the existing studies, however, consider a group of the CEE markets, stressing their...

This thesis will be concerned with investigating the empirical characteristics of stock returns,forUKfirms which are distinguished by market value. The primary aimof thisworkis to identifywhether there are differences between the behaviour of large and small firm retums.A substantial amount of...

This thesis examines the links between economic time-series innovations and statisticalrisk factors in the UK stock market using principal components analysis (PCA) and thegeneral-to-specific (Gets) approach to econometric modelling.A multi-factor risk structure for the UK stock market is...

This study examines whether short-sellers and financial analysts develop complementary information about future earnings and returns and assesses whether investors can improve predictions made by each of these intermediaries using information provided by the other. The first main result is that...

We propose an asset pricing model in a production economy where cash flows are determined by firms' optimal dividend and investment decisions. Extensive and intensive decision margins in dividend payout are modeled with cash holding and investment adjustment costs. The model implies that delays...