This paper compares the performance of safe haven assets during two stressful stock market regimes – the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis across the ten largest economies in the world shows that the traditional choice, gold, acts as a safe haven during the...

This paper compares the performance of safe haven assets during two stressful stock market regimes – the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis across the ten largest economies in the world shows that the traditional choice, gold, acts as a safe haven during the...

We employ a characteristic-based model to decompose total analyst coverage into abnormal and expected components and show that abnormal coverage contains valuable information about individual firm ex-ante crash risk (proxied by implied volatility smirk from options data). Specifically, one...

We investigate the effects of S&P's sovereign re-ratings on the higher moments of equity market returns over recent financial crises. Using a set of intraday stock market index prices and sovereign credit ratings for a sample of 36 countries which experienced sovereign rating changes over the...

This study examines whether individualistic national culture is associated with stock price crash risk (“crash risk”) for a sample of firms from 36 countries over the period of 1990 to 2015. We find robust evidence that firms in more individualistic cultural settings exhibit higher future...

We examine whether connected hedge funds (i.e. those that are prime-brokerage clients of bailout banks) benefited from bailout programs initiated in seven countries during the 2007–2009 financial crisis. We find that being connected to a bailout bank is generally beneficial for hedge funds in...

This study examines the impact of cash holdings on firm value before and during the 2008 financial crisis. In answering this question, our analysis assesses the conditioning effect of financial constraints and corporate governance. In our core analysis we show that the equity market places a...

This paper assesses how the presence of rating actions and discordant evaluations by a different rival credit rating agency (CRA) affects the timing of downgrades and the likelihood of rating convergence in the aftermath of the subprime crisis. We analyse a large sample of subprime...