I investigate the role of economic policy uncertainty (EPU), proxied by the news-based measure of Baker et al. (2016), in the cross-section of individual stock returns in 23 countries. I estimate a stock's beta toward its country-specific EPU index (βEPU) and show that stocks in the lowest...

We provide evidence on the performance and the replication success of a broad sample of 72 synthetic hedge funds from January 2009 to December 2013. Thereby, we assign the term 'synthetic hedge fund' to mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with hedge fund indices as their benchmarks....

We examine how production flexibility affects financial leverage. A worldwide sample of energy utilities allows us to apply direct measures for production flexibility based on their power plants. We find that production flexibility increases financial leverage. For identification, we exploit...

This dissertation analyzes how asset performance relates to inflation based on 50 countries and 60 years of data. The three key findings are: a nonlinear behavior of bills, bonds, and equities against inflation, the demystification of listed infrastructure as inflation hedge, and, finally, a...

In this paper we propose a measure of systemic risk in the financial sector, the Expected Systemic Shortfall (ESS) indicator. The ESS-indicator is the product of the probability of a systemic default event and the expected tail loss in case this systemic event occurs. We compute the...

Even though infrastructure investments have gained increasing investor attention over the past decade, the empirical evidence on their risk characteristics is still limited. To fill this gap, we analyze the risk properties of a unique cross-sectional sample of more than 1,400 publicly listed...