Political uncertainty drives markets. Among macroeconomic forces, it is one of the fewfactors that systematically affect most assets - hence it qualifies as a state variable in the senseof the ICAPM and should carry a risk premium. We employ static and conditional factormodels using data in...

Why do countries differ so much in terms of their financial systems? Are banks and equity competing or complementary sources of financing for firms? To address these questions, I study various determinants of capital market development and whether these determinants favor one form of capital...

Using a panel of 27 countries, we analyze the effects of stock market liberalization on financial and macroeconomic development. We find that liberalization is associated with a short-term increase in real private investment growth of about 14 percentage points cumulatively in the four years...

We model the distribution of daily stock trading volume using the power law and document a new phenomenon. The power law exponent systematically increases with time suggesting that trading is becoming increasingly concentrated in a subset of stocks

This is the first study to investigate the profitability of Barroso and Santa-Clara's (2015) risk-managing approach for George and Hwang's (2004) 52-week high momentum strategy in an industrial portfolio setting. The findings indicate that risk-managing adds value as the Sharpe ratio increases,...

This paper studies whether the choice of the crisis start dates affects the magnitude of contagion estimates. Contagion models generally use exogenously determined crisis start date by relying on event-based markers. We conduct structural break tests and endogenously determine the start dates of...

We consider whether key financial variables predict macroeconomic series and if any predictive power for output growth is also seen in consumption or investment growth. Such information will allow the use of financial markets as a leading indicator for macroeconomic performance. Full sample...

We study intraday, market-wide shocks to stock prices, market liquidity, and trading activity on international stock markets and assess the relevance of recent theories on "liquidity dry-ups" in explaining such shocks. Market-wide price shocks are prevalent and large, with rapid spillovers...