We examine the cross-section of international equity risk premia with machine learning methods. We identify, classify, and calculate 88 market characteristics and use them to forecast country returns with various machine learning techniques. While all algorithms produce substantial economic...

Using data on 65,000 stocks from 23 countries, the authors re-evaluate the performance of the Fama-French (2015) factors in global markets. The results provide convincing evidence that the value, profitability, and investment factors are far less reliable than commonly thought. Their performance...

Investors often focus their attention on recent information only, underestimating the rele-vance of information from the distant past. In consequence, the ordering of historical re-turns robustly predicts future stock performance in the cross-section. Using data from 49 countries, we...

This paper examines the impact vaccination programs have on the stock market volatility of the travel and leisure sector. Using daily data from 56 countries over the period from January 2020 to March 2021, we find that vaccination leads to a decrease in the investment risk of travel and leisure...

We test the interaction between COVID-19 governments' interventions, COVID-19- induced uncertainty, and the volatility of sovereign bonds. Using a panel-quantile approach and a comprehensive dataset of 31 countries worldwide, we document that containment and closure policies tend to amplify...

We perform a comprehensive investigation of the illiquidity premium in international stock markets. We examine several established liquidity measures in 45 countries for the years 1990–2020. Our findings provide convincing evidence that liquidity pricing depends strongly on firm size. Although...

Does past stock price reaction to pandemics contain information about future returns? To answer this, we estimate firm exposure to a pandemic index representing global concerns of infectious diseases. We demonstrate that such a pandemic beta reliably predicts the cross-section of future stock...

Interest rate changes typically affect the value of equities. However, the slow movement of investment capital may delay the transmission of this information from interest rate markets to stocks. Using a century of data from sixty countries, we demonstrate that yield curve shifts predict future...

We are the first to demonstrate the decline in the cross-sectional predictability of country and industry returns in recent years. We examine 53 anomalies in country and industry indices from 64 markets for the years 1973–2018. The profitability of the strategies has significantly decreased...

The salience theory perspective on asset prices implies that investors overvalue stocks with salient upsides and undervaluing firms with salient downsides. The resulting mispricing is subsequently reverted, producing a predictable pattern in the cross-section of returns. This study is the first...