The last three decades brought mounting evidence regarding the cross-sectional predictability of country equity returns. The studies not only documented country-level counterparts of well-established stock-level anomalies, such as size, value, or momentum, but also demonstrated some unique...

At the global level, the mispricing theory of mergers by Shleifer and Vishny (2003) may imply that a significant number of targets acquired in a given country is a sign of market-wide undervaluation whereas intense acquisition activity indicates overvaluation. The present study develops a...

The study concentrates on the benefits of passive commodity investments in the context of the phenomenon of financialization. The research investigates the implications of increase in the correlation coefficients between equity and commodity investments for investors in financial markets. The...

We examine return predictability with machine learning in 46 international stock markets. We calculate 148 stock characteristics and use them to feed a repertoire of different models. The algorithms extract predictability mainly from simple, yet popular, factor types—such as momentum,...

We perform a comprehensive investigation of the illiquidity premium in international stock markets. We examine several established liquidity measures in 45 countries for the years 1990–2020. Our findings provide convincing evidence that liquidity pricing depends strongly on firm size. Although...

Do firms conducting reverse splits underperform or overperform in the long run? To resolve this question we investigate the long-term returns following more than 5,000 reverse splits conducted in 24 developed equity markets between the years 1990 and 2016. Using the calendar-time portfolio...

What determines a country's financial immunity to a global pandemic? To answer this question, we investigate the behavior of 67 equity markets around the world during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. We consider a multidimensional data set that includes factors from finance, economic,...