We find that a small set of financial columnists has a causal effect on short-term aggregate stock market prices. For some journalists (“bulls”) the market reaction is consistently positive, whereas for others (“bears”) it is negative. Because bulls and bears are rotated exogenously in our setting, we can make causal inferences about the media’s impact on aggregate market returns. Journalist ef...

The concept of efficient market hypothesis has prevailed the financial markets for a long time which says that the prices of the securities reflect all available information. This approach was mainly followed by the rational investors but with the passage of time, the concept of behavioral finance emerged due to some of the major global financial crashes. This concept states that there are inve...

In this paper we survey the recent research on the fundamental determinants of stock returns. These studies explore how firms’ systematic risk and their investment and production decisions are jointly determined in equilibrium. Models with production provide insights into several types of empirical patterns, including: i) the correlations between firms’ economic characteristics and their risk p...

A simple non-stationary paradigm for the dynamics of multivariate returns is discussed. Unlike most of the multivariate econometric models for financial returns, our approach supposes the volatility to be exogenous and non-stationary. The vectors of returns are assumed to be animated by a slowly changing unconditional covariance structure. The methodological frame is that of non-parametric regr...

Bali and Cakici (2006) find no relation between equally-weighted portfolio returns and idiosyncratic risk, whereas Ang et al. (2006a) report a negative relation between value-weighted portfolio returns and idiosyncratic risk. Our analyses demonstrate that both findings can be explained by short-term monthly return reversals. The abnormal positive returns from taking a long (short) position in t...

We survey a theory of the economic underpinnings of the fat-tailed distributions of a number of financial variables, such as returns and trading volumes. Our theory posits that they have a common origin in the strategic trading behavior of very large financial institutions in a relatively illiquid market. We show how the fat-tailed distribution of fund sizes can indeed generate extreme returns ...

High frequency data provides a rich source of information for understanding financial markets and time series properties of returns. This paper estimates models of high frequency index futures returns using ‘around the clock’ 5-minute returns that incorporate the following key features: multiple persistent stochastic volatility factors, jumps in prices and volatilities, seasonal components capt...

In recent years, large amounts of financial data have become available for analysis. We propose exploring returns from 21 European stock markets by model-based clustering of regime switching models. These econometric models identify clusters of time series with similar dynamic patterns and moreover allow relaxing assumptions of existing approaches, such as the assumption of conditional Gaussian...

1 Preliminary version, please do not quote. Comments are welcome! ABSTARCT The objective of this paper is to outline our research project about the inclusion of supply-side variables into the CGE framework. Although the model is still in progress, this paper will discuss the basic algorithm we are planning to build in order to include supply-side transmission mechanism into the CGE framework. I...

The focus of our paper is on the implications of model uncertainty for the crosssectional properties of returns. We perform our analysis in the context of a tractable single-period mean-variance framework. We show that there is an uncertainty premium in equilibrium expected returns on financial assets and study how the premium varies across the assets. In particular, the cross-sectional distrib...