Style index providers use different factors to classify stocks. Russell and S&P for example use Price/Book, while Surz Style Pure indexes use 3 factors - Price/Earnings, dividend yield, and normalized Price/Book. These factors are sometimes in disagreement, with P/B classifying a stock as value...

In order to shed light on the "black box" of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteen German states (L¨ander) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of a capital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed income market for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals...

Following Diamond (1997) and Fecht (2004) we use a model in which financial market access of households restrains the efficiency of the liquidity insurance that banks' deposit contracts provide to households that are subject to idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. But in contrast to these approaches...

This paper studies the signalling effect of the consumption-wealth ratio (cay) on German stock returns via vector error correction models (VECMs). The effect of cay on U.S. stock returns has been recently confirmed by Lettau and Ludvigson with a two-stage method. In this paper, performances of...

One of the main results of the literature on the effects of uncertainty on trade states that uncertainty should not matter in the presence of well developed forward markets. Empirical studies, however, do not support this result. We derive the demand for forward cover in a small open economy...

This paper aims to analyze the impact of different types of venture capitalists on the performance of their portfolio firms around and after the IPO. We thereby investigate the hypothesis that different governance structures, objectives and track record of different types of VCs have a...

Exchanges in Europe are in a process of consolidation. After the failure of the proposed merger between Deutsche Börse and Euronext, these two groups are likely to become the nuclei for further mergers and co-operation with currently independent exchanges. A decision for one of the groups...

We develop a multivariate generalization of the Markov-switching GARCH model introduced by Haas, Mittnik, and Paolella (2004b) and derive its fourth-moment structure. An application to international stock markets illustrates the relevance of accounting for volatility regimes from both a...