We show that the behaviour of the real exchange rates of the UK, Germany, France and Japan has been characterised by structural breaks which changed the adjustment mechanism. In the context of a Time-Varying Smooth Transition AutoRegressive of the kind introduced by Lundbergh et al (2003), we...

Although, according to uncovered interest rate parity, exchange rates should move so as to prevent the carry trade being systematically profitable, there is a vast empirical literature demonstrating the opposite. High interest currencies more often tend to appreciate rather than depreciate, as...

We construct investor sentiment of UK stock market using the procedure of principal component analysis. Using sentiment-augmented EGARCH component model, we analyse the impacts of sentiment on market excess return, the permanent component of market volatility and the transitory component of...

The seminal Barro (2006) closed-economy model of the equity risk premium in the presence of extreme events (disasters) allowed for leverage in the form of risky corporate debt which defaulted only in states when the Government defaulted on its debt. The probability of default was therefore...

We analyse the well-known TORQ dataset of trades on the NYSE over a 3-month period, breaking down transactions depending on whether the active or passive side was institutional or private. This allows us to compare the returns on the different trade categories. We find that, however we analyse...

The current subprime crisis has prompted us to look again into the nature of risk at the tail of the distribution. In particular, we investigate the risk contribution of an asset, which has infrequent but huge losses, to a portfolio using two risk measures, namely Value-at-Risk (VaR) and...

In a dataset of weekly observations over the period since 1990, the discount on UK closed-end mutual funds is shown to be nonstationary, but reverting to a nonzero long run mean. Although the long run discount could be explained by factors like management expenses etc., its short run...

We extend the Barro (2006) closed-economy model of the equity risk premium in the presence of extreme events (disasters) to a two-country world. In this more general setting, both the output risk of rare disasters and the associated risk of a default on Government debt, can be diversiÖed. The...

We show that the probability of information-based trade (PIN) played a significant role in explaining monthly returns on Shanghai A shares over the period 2001 to 2006. In particular, PIN, as approximated by order imbalance as a proportion of total transactions, appears to explain returns even...