This paper provides new evidence on the dynamics of equity risk premia in euro area stock markets across country and industry portfolios. We develop and estimate a conditional intertemporal CAPM where returns on aggregate euro area, country and industry portfolios depend on the market risk as well as on the risk that the investment opportunity set changes over time. Prices of risks are time-var...

During the latter part of the 1990s the introduction of the euro, the dramatic increase in the supply of venture capital in most EU countries, and the creation of several ‘new’ equity markets targeted at innovative firms have dramatically transformed the financing prospects of European entrepreneurial firms. In this study we contribute to a deeper understanding of their actual relevance by (i) ...

This paper investigates the determinants of public pension plan risk-taking behavior using the percentage of total plan assets invested in the equity markets and the pension asset beta as measures of investment risk. We find that government accounting standards strongly affect public fund investment risk, as higher return assumptions (used to discount pension liabilities) are associated with hi...

This paper provides a set of empirical tests of the cross-sectional variation of stock volatility and investablility, where investability is defined as the degree to which a stock is accessible to foreigners. Unlike previous studies, which focus on market volatility and market return, we study the relationship between individual stock return volatility and its investablility. Our findings have ...

 The effect of technology spillovers is widely considered as one of the main channels through which domestic firms benefit from FDI, and plays an important role in economic development of host countries. Based on the analysis framework for technology spillovers established by Borensztein et al. (1998), this paper will analyse and try to figure out the development patterns of ASEAN by utilizing ...

The sharp increase in equity prices over the 1990s was widely attributed to permanently higher productivity growth derived from the New Economy. This paper establishes a rational expectations model of technology innovations and equity prices, which shows that under plausible assumptions, productivity advances can only have temporary effects on the fundamentals of equity prices. Using historical...

Based on industry-level data for majority-owned U.S. foreign affiliates in 49 countries, this paper identifies the determinants of the cross-country distribution of fixed capital within multinational companies. Controlling for market size and trade openness, it is shown that U.S.-owned capital stocks are high in countries with a history of high profitability and low earnings variability. Simila...

The paper analyzes the information and agency cost effects of bank equity stakes in a universal banking system where banks can also be shareholders in borrowing firms. We test the agency and signaling hypotheses explaining the bank motivations for holding equity of borrowing firms in the Spanish market and we analyze the share abnormal returns around the announcements of bank equity holdings. T...

this paper presents a new index of financial stress which is constructed by macro data from different financial markets (including banking sector and also housing, foreign exchange and stock markets). the proposed approach has been applied to the iranian economy based on the available quarterly time series, covering the period 1991(1)–2008(2). the paper explains how the selected components capt...

The observed predictability of excess returns in equity and foreign exchange markets has largely been attributed to the presence of time-varying risk premiums in these markets. For example, excess equity returns were found to be explained by various financial and economic variables. Similarly, in the foreign exchange market, the forward rate was found not to be an unbiased predictor of the futu...