I show that the US dollar earns a safety premium versus a basket of foreign currencies and that this premium is particularly high in times of global financial stress. These findings support the view that the dollar acts as the reserve currency for the international monetary system and that it is a natural safe haven in times of crisis, when a global flight to quality toward the reserve currency...

This paper investigates how and to what extent institutional development influences and permits firm-specific information to be incorporated into share prices, as measured by stock price synchronicity. Tracing the experience of China, an economy undergoing dramatic changes in the last 20 years with rich variation in experiences across provinces, this paper reveals that stock price synchronicity...

Open-market repurchases reduce the supply of a stock’s shares in the market. Japanese stock repurchase data allows us to successfully isolate the supply effect from information effects of the stock repurchase. We focus on stock price behavior during the actual repurchase period when no new information is released and find that the excess stock returns are significantly positive only during actu...

This study estimates liquidity premiums using the recently developed Liu (2006) measure within a multifactor capital asset pricing model (CAPM) including size premiums and a time varying parameter model for the West African emerging market of Nigeria. The evidence suggests that liquidity factors are relevant only for financial and basic materials sector stocks while size factor is more generall...

Evidence indicates that people fear change and the unknown. We model this behavior as familiarity bias in which individuals focus on adverse scenarios in evaluating defections from the status quo. The model explains portfolio underdiversification, home and local biases. More importantly, equilibrium stock prices reflect an unfamiliarity premium. In an international setting, our model predicts t...

This paper uses a simple model of mean-variance capital markets equilibrium with proportional transactions costs to analyze the competition of stock markets for investors. We assume that equity trading is costly and endogenize transactions costs as variables strategically influenced by stock exchanges. Among other things, the model predicts that increasing financial market correlation leads to ...

During the latter part of the 1990s the introduction of the euro, the dramatic increase in the supply of venture capital in most EU countries, and the creation of several ‘new’ equity markets targeted at innovative firms have dramatically transformed the financing prospects of European entrepreneurial firms. In this study we contribute to a deeper understanding of their actual relevance by (i) ...

In the nineteenseventies, James Tobin suggested the introduction of a transaction tax on the currency market to cope with exchange rate volatility. We investigate the consequences of the introduction of such a tax on an asset market model from a game-theoretic and an experimental point of view. Our main results include in respect to our model that contrary to the situation in game-theoretic equ...

Contributing to the literature on local bias, we examine how the direct and indirect network ties of financial intermediaries mitigate two types of information problems, the identification of investment opportunities and the evaluation of their quality. In our analysis of the non-domestic IPOs and trade sales exits of European venture capitalbacked companies, we find that direct and indirect ne...

For most of the postwar period, Europe’s capital markets remained largely closed to international capital flows. This paper explores the costs of this policy. Using the familiar event-study methodology, we examine the extent to which restrictions of current and capital account convertibility affected stock returns. We find that the delayed introduction of full currency convertibility increased ...