This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...

This paper investigates the international spillovers of government debt and the associated risk of inflation within a monetary union when countries have different pension systems. I use a stochastic two-country two-period overlapping-generations model, where one country has PAYG pensions and the...

Theoretical models on the selling process in the housing market are scarce. Taylor (1999) specifies a model where time-on-the-market gives a quality signal of the house to potential buyers if inspection outcomes of the house are not public. We specify a duration model with competing risks, where...

Housing markets typically exhibit a strong positive correlation between the rate of price increase and the number of houses sold. We document this correlation on high-quality Dutch data for the period 1985-2007, and estimate a VEC-model that allows us to study the mechanism giving rise to the...

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

Since Black (1976), the source of the stock price volatility smirk has remained a controversy. The volatility smirk is a side effect of agency conflict. An important distinction is that the smirk occurs in the optimum, even after agency conflict has been resolved. The slope of the smirk is found...

In this paper we document that realized variation measures constructed from high-frequency returns reveal a large degree of volatility risk in stock and index returns, where we characterize volatility risk by the extent to which forecasting errors in realized volatility are substantive. Even...

This paper features an analysis of volatility spillover effects from Australia's major trading partners, namely, China, Japan, Korea and the United States, for a period running from 12th September 2002 to 9th September 2012. This captures the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). These...

Traditional finance is built on the rationality paradigm. This chapter discusses simple models from an alternative approach in which financial markets are viewed as complex evolutionary systems. Agents are boundedly rational and base their investment decisions upon market forecasting heuristics....

The equity premium is a key parameter in asset allocation policies. There is a vigorous debate in the literature regarding the actual measurement of the equity premium, its size and the determinants of its variation. This study aims to take stock of this literature by means of a meta-analysis....