We introduce a methodology which deals with possibly integrated variables in the specification of the betas of conditional asset pricing models. In such a case, any model which is directly derived by a polynomial approximation of the functional form of the conditional beta will inherit a...

This paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on stock returns, CDS and economic activity in the US and the five European countries (the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) which have been most affected. The sample period covers the dates from the first confirmed COVID-19 cases in...

Modern investors face a high-dimensional prediction problem: thousands of observable variables are potentially relevant for forecasting. We reassess the conventional wisdom on market efficiency in light of this fact. In our model economy, which resembles a typical machine learning setting, N...

This paper compares volatility forecasts for the RTS Index (the main index for the Russian stock market) generated by alternative models, specifically option-implied volatility forecasts based on the Black-Scholes model, ARCH/GARCH-type model forecasts, and forecasts combining those two using a...

Macroeconomic news announcements are elaborate and multi-dimensional. We consider a framework in which jumps in asset prices around macroeconomic news and monetary policy announcements reflect both the response to observed surprises in headline numbers and latent factors, reflecting other...

We study the information flow from the ECB on policy dates since its inception, using tick data. We show that three factors capture about all of the variation in the yield curve but that these are different factors with different variance shares in the window that contains the policy decision...

The equity premium puzzle holds that the coefficient of relative risk aversion estimated from the consumption based CAPM under power utility is excessively high. Moreover, estimates in the literature vary considerably across countries. We gauge the uncertainty pertaining to the country risk...

This paper examines the implications of pricing errors and factors that are not strong for the Fama-MacBeth two-pass estimator of risk premia and its asymptotic distribution when T is fixed with n → ∞, and when both n and T → ∞, jointly. While the literature just distinguishes strong and...

This paper investigates persistence in high-frequency, intraday data (and also daily and monthly ones) in the case of the EuroStoxx 50 futures over the period from 2002 to 2018 (720 million trade records) using R/S analysis and the Hurst exponent as a measure of persistence. The results indicate...

This paper examines the long-run dynamics and the cyclical structure of various series related to the US stock market using fractional integration. We implement a procedure which enables one to consider unit roots with possibly fractional orders of integration both at the zero (long-run) and the...