Recent literature show that leverage has a negative effect on stock returns, which is contradicting with influential finance theories and models. Based on the time-period 1966-2015, the five-factor model and an international dataset, this thesis sets the focus on the question what kind of effect...

Building on prior literature which suggests that investors in most countries, but not Japan, are subject to behavioural biases that cause momentum, and informed by the shared cultural values in Japan which leans heavily in favour of collective action, this paper asks whether stock return...

We study the persistence over time of nine well-known equity market anomalies in the cross-section of U.K. stocks. We find strong evidence of diminished statistical significance for most of these anomalies including the return reversal and momentum effects. Two anomalies -- firm profitability...

Daily return distributions are modeled by pure jump limit laws that are selfdecomposable laws. The returns may be seen as composed of a sum of independent and identically distributed increments or as a selfsimilar law scaling the sum of exponentially weighted past shocks or a combination...

Reasons behind IVOL puzzle remain largely unexplained. With a method misidentifying return reversal, Huang et al. (2010) claim that return reversal, a result of overreaction, leads to IVOL puzzle. We demonstrate that IVOL puzzle is a result of underreaction rather than of overreaction from both...

I examine whether the market's reaction to firms' earnings news varies with analysis (i.e., editorial content) produced by financial journalists. A series of restructuring events at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) suggests that WSJ articles improve price discovery and increase trading volume at...

This paper analyzes the nominal yields of UK gilt-edged securities (“gilts”) based on a Keynesian perspective, which holds that the short-term interest rate is the primary driver of the long-term interest rate. Quarterly data are used to model gilts' nominal yields. These models bring to...

We have seen China's growing role in the past decades, and the world economy has become more exposed to the influence of China. This paper explores emerging China's impact on the global equity market through the lens of asset pricing. We study the predictive properties of the lagged China...

There are two primary factors that can affect expected returns for ESG companies with high ratings – investor preferences and risk. While it is true that investor preferences for highly rated ESG companies can lower the cost of capital and, thereby, increase the value of those companies, the...

The identical cash flow rights of Chinese A and B shares provide a natural experiment that allows us to explore how investor clienteles affect stock return patterns. Chinese domestic retail investors are responsible for the majority of trades in A shares, while foreign institutional investors...