We investigate how the volatility of carbon emission allowance (EUA) prices affects European stock market sectors. We employ a connectedness network analysis on prices of EUA futures and FTSE stock market sector indices and find that the EUA is mostly a net receiver of volatility connectedness and significantly receives volatility across most sectors during the recent European energy crisis. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

We investigate the value of investor relations (IR) and find firms with strong IR to experience between five and eight percentage points higher stock returns than those with weak IR during the COVID-19 crisis. Firms with better-quality IR are also associated with higher investor loyalty and appear to have attracted significantly more institutional investors over the crisis period. This suggests that a firm's IR contributes to value generation by enhancing credibility with shareholders and by diversifying its shareholder base. After decomposing IR into public and private transmission channels, we find the private IR function to be the main driver of our results. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

We investigate the relationship between environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and the probability of corporate credit default. By using a sample of 902 publicly-listed firms in the US from 2002 to 2017 and by converting Standard & Poor’s credit ratings into default probabilities from rating transition matrices, we find the probability of corporate credit default to be significantly lower for firms with high ESG performance. Furthermore, by expanding the time window in our regression analysis, we observe that the influence of ESG and its constituents strongly varies over time. We argue that these dynamics may be due to financial and regulatory shocks. In a sector decomposition, we additionally find that the energy sector is most influenced by ESG regarding the probability of corporate credit default. We expect an increasing availability of ESG data in the future to reduce possible survivorship bias and to enhance the comparison between ESG-rated and non-ESG-rated firms. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

We investigate the association between Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings and stock performance during the COVID-19 crisis. Although there is mixed evidence in the literature whether ESG is valuable in times of crisis, we find high ESG-rated European firms to be associated with higher abnormal returns and lower stock volatility. After decomposing ESG into its separate components, we find the social score to be the predominant driver of our results. Further, we argue that ESG is value-enhancing in low-trust countries, and in countries with poorer security regulations and where lower disclosure standards prevail. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

We investigate the relationship between firm efficiency and stock returns during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that highly efficient firms experienced at least 9.44 percentage points higher cumulative returns during the market collapse. A long-short portfolio consisting of efficient and inefficient firms would have also yielded a significantly positive weekly return of 3.53% on average. Overall, our results show that firm efficiency has significant explanatory power for stock returns during the crisis period. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

Generative machine learning methods deliver unprecedented quality in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. When comparing models for these task, the user can fast and reliably judge generated data with her bare eye—for humans, it is easy to decide whether an image or a paragraph of text is realistic. However, generative models for time series data from natural or social processes are largely unexplored, partially due to a lack of reliable and practical quality measures. In this work, measures for the evaluation of generative models for time series data are studied—in total, over 1000 models are trained and analyzed. The well-established maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and our novel proposal: the Hausdorff discrepancy (HD) are considered for quantifying the disagreement between the sample distribution of each generated data set and the ground truth data. While MMD relies on the distance between mean-vectors in an implicit high-dimensional feature space, the proposed HD relies on intuitive and explainable geometric properties of a “typical” sample. Both discrepancies are instantiated for three underlying distance measures, namely Euclidean, dynamic time warping, and Frechét distance. The discrepancies are applied to evaluate samples from generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, and Markov random fields. Experiments on real-world energy prices and humidity measurements suggest, that considering a single score is insufficient for judging the quality of a generative model. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Measuring mutual fund managers’ skills by Microsoft’s TrueSkill algorithm, we find highly skilled managers to behave self-confident resulting in higher risk-taking in the second half of the year compared to less skilled managers. Introducing the TrueSkill algorithm, which is widely used in the e-sports community, to this branch of literature, we can replicate previous findings and theories suggesting overconfidence for mid-years winners. © 2021, The Author(s).

We investigate if trust affects global stock market volatility during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a sample of 47 national stock markets, we find the stock markets’ volatility to be significantly lower in high-trust countries (in reaction to COVID-19 case announcements). Both trust in fellow citizens as well as in the countries’ governments are of significant importance. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.

We present a new approach to test empirically the financial distress costs theory of corporate hedging. We estimate the ex-ante expected financial distress costs, which serve as a starting point to construct further explanatory variables in an equilibrium setting, as a fraction of the value of an asset-or-nothing put option on the firm's assets. Using single-contract data of the derivatives' use of 189 German middle-market companies that stems from a major bank as well as Basel II default probabilities and historical accounting information, we are able to explain a significant share of the observed cross-sectional differences in hedge ratios. Hence, our analysis adds further support for the financial distress costs theory of corporate hedging from the perspective of a financial intermediary. © 2020 The Authors. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

We introduce a set of new Value-at-Risk independence backtests by establishing a connection between the independence property of Value-at-Risk forecasts and the extremal index, a general measure of extremal clustering of stationary sequences. For this purpose, we introduce a sequence of relative excess returns whose extremal index is to be estimated. We compare our backtest to both popular and recent competitors using Monte Carlo simulations and find considerable power in many scenarios. In an applied section, we perform realistic out-of-sample forecasts with common forecasting models and discuss advantages and pitfalls of our approach. © 2020 The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: Journals.permissions@oup.com.

We analyze the quality of Bitcoin volatility forecasting of GARCH-type models applying different volatility proxies and loss functions. We construct model confidence sets and find them to be systematically smaller for asymmetric loss functions and a jump robust proxy. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

Recent history reveals a series of rogue traders, jeopardizing their employers’ assets and reputation. There have been instances of unauthorized acting in concert between traders, their supervisors and/or firms’ decision makers and executives, resulting in collusive rogue trading. We explore organizational misbehaviour theory and explain three major collusive rogue trading events at National Australia Bank, JPMorgan with its London Whale and the interest reference rate manipulation/LIBOR scandal through a descriptive model of organizational/structural, individual and group forces. Our model draws conclusions on how banks can set up behavioural risk management and internal control frameworks to mitigate potential collusive rogue trading. © 2019, Springer Nature B.V.

We explore if the corona-crash 2020 was driven by news attention or rational expectations about the pandemic's economic impact. Using a sample of 64 national stock markets covering 94% of the world's GDP, we find the stock markets' decline to be mainly associated with higher news attention and less with rational expectation. We estimate the economic cost from the news hype to amount to USD 3.5 trillion for the US and USD 200 billion on average for the rest of the G8 countries. © 2020 by the authors.

In a consumption based asset pricing model one can calculate the volatility of (log-)consumption growth from the expected market return and from the risk-free rate. We propose to use the difference between these estimates to measure ambiguity about consumption volatility. Using a long dataset we show this measure explains up to 69% of post-war variation in the market risk premium. © 2018

Model-free tests for constant parameters often fail to detect structural changes in high dimensions. In practice, this corresponds to a portfolio with many assets and a reasonable long time series. We reduce the dimensionality of the problem by looking at a compressed panel of time series obtained by cluster analysis and the principal components of the data. With this procedure, we can extend tests for constant correlation matrix from a sub-portfolio to whole indices, which we exemplify using a major stock index. © 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

We study the influence of stock liquidity on the stock price jump frequency using intraday data of 175 US stocks during 2007–11. Grouping these stocks according to their average liquidity we find less liquid stocks to jump more often than liquid stocks. Depending on the liquidity measure the least liquid stocks exhibit on average between 10% and 34% more jumps than the most liquid stocks. Our results are robust to different definitions of liquidity and jump measures as well prevail under different time frequencies. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The introduction of futures on Bitcoin eases the access of institutional investors to the market and offers an efficient way to short the cryptocurrency. We investigate the effect of this event on the market's price efficiency and find the Bitcoin market to turn efficient. We conduct commonly used tests for market efficiency and check the robustness of our results by investigating Bitcoin Cash, a hard fork of Bitcoin, where we do not find a change in market's efficiency. © 2018 Elsevier Inc.

We compare and generalize various partial orderings of probability forecasters according to the quality of their predictions. It appears that the calibration requirement is quite at odds with the possibility of some such ordering. However, if the requirements of calibration and identical sets of debtors are relaxed, comparability obtains more easily. Taking default predictions in the credit rating industry as an example, we show for a database of 5333 (Moody’s) and 6505 10-year default predictions (S&P), that Moody’s and S&P cannot be ordered neither according to their grade distributions given default nor non-default or to their Gini- curves, but Moody’s dominate S&P with respect to the ROC-criterion. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

This paper extends the literature on predatory short selling and bailouts through a joint analysis of the two. We consider a model with informed short sales, as well as uninformed predatory short sales, which can trigger the inefficient liquidation of a firm. We obtain several novel results: A government commitment to bail out insolvent firms with positive probability can increase welfare because it selectively deters predatory short selling without hampering desirable informed short sales. Contrasting a common view, bailouts can be optimal ex ante but undesirable ex post. Furthermore, bailouts in our model are a better policy tool than short selling restrictions. Welfare gains from the bailout policy are unevenly distributed: shareholders gain while taxpayers lose. Bailout taxes allow ex ante Pareto improvements. © 2018 German Economic Association (Verein für Socialpolitik)

We study the efficiency of cryptocurrencies by measuring the price's reaction time to unexpected relevant information. We find the average price delay to significantly decrease during the last three years. For the cross-section of 75 cryptocurrencies we find delays to be highly correlated with liquidity. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.

A more precise differentiation of directional asymmetry and dispersion of income distributions, drawing on an internal contextual perspective is enabled by introducing a new metric for asymmetry and spread. This dual metric can be plotted over time into a phase plane, enabling comparative social welfare perspectives over time and between countries. We utilize the metrics to visualize the dramatic changes that took place in Europe prior to and after the global financial crisis. Major differences are revealed, in terms of asymmetry and spread, some countries have been fallers (lower in both) while other countries are risers. © 2017

This article studies how German firms evaluate a recent national corporate social responsibility (CSR) law based on a European Union directive and the burden they expect regarding their organizational responsibilities due to mandatory sustainability reporting. One hundred and fifty-one firms of different sizes directly or indirectly affected by the law are included in the survey and their responses empirically analyzed using two-tailed t-tests and simple linear regression. Anchoring the discussion in stakeholder theory and the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) literature while considering large-firm idiosyncrasies, the results show differing effects on SMEs and large firms as well as firms which are directly and indirectly affected. Findings show that firm size only matters for the evaluation of the law by directly affected firms, while size does not matter in the case of indirectly affected firms. Possible moderators of this evaluation are grounded in the resource-based theory and formalization of CSR. This article contributes to the understanding of when firm size matters in the case of mandatory sustainability reporting and underlines the role of organizational resources and capabilities as well as the special position of SMEs. © 2018 by the authors.

With new regulations like the credit valuation adjustment, the assessment of wrong-way-risk is of utter importance. We analyse the effect of a counterparty's credit risk and its influence on other asset classes (equity, currency, commodity and interest rate) in the event of extreme market movements like the counterparty's default. With an extreme value approach, we model the tail of the joint distribution of different asset returns belonging to the above asset classes and counterparty credit risk indicated by changes in CDS spreads and calculate the effect on the expected shortfall when conditioning on counterparty credit risk. We find the conditional expected shortfall to be 2 to 440% higher than the unconditional expected shortfall depending on the asset class. Our results give insights both for risk management and for setting an initial margin for non-centrally cleared derivatives which becomes mandatory in the European Market Infrastructure Regulation. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

In response to the financial crisis the European Union proposes bail-ins as a new regulatory instrument. For banks this mechanism affects the funding costs that now depend on the amount of assets under encumbrance. The bank's optimal level of asset encumbrance, however, is not necessarily optimal for its senior unsecured investors. In a new simulation framework, we access the effects of the bail-in regulation and the effect on the costs of banks and investors. Analyzing major EU banks' funding structure we find funding cost should be up to 49 basis points higher to reflect the increased risk for senior unsecured investors. On the other hand all banks of our sample could lower their overall cost level by up to 17 basis points by increasing the level of asset encumbrance. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Using a generalized dynamic factor model, we identify a latent common factor in a broad sample of thirty-one commodity futures’ returns between 1996 and 2015. An investigation of sub-periods reveals an increasing correlation between the common factor and changes in gold and oil prices during the financial crisis. We also consider whether the common factors of commodity subsectors give an advantage to the pricing of commodity futures’ returns. In the cross-section of individual futures’ returns we suggest that two- or three-factor models that include energy's or agriculture's common factors can explain commodity returns. Thus, our results indicate an increasing homogeneity of the commodity markets in recent years. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.

We study the effect of the first introduction of central clearing to the credit default swap market using a data set of intraday quotes sent directly by the major dealers to the market. We find the event to eliminate counterparty risk and improve price information. Furthermore, we find riskier dealers to increase their trading activity. In fact, after the elimination of their counterparty risk premium they increase the number of competitive quotes both on the bid and ask sides but more pronounced on the ask side. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.

Most industrial nations are reliant on a secure supply of raw materials but typically do not possess access to primary resources; a situation widely accepted by their respective governments which have instigated a variety of programs to secure availability. In this article, we explore the effect of financing conditions on the availability of base metals. Using fixed effects regression on international trade and banking data we find a consistent negative relationship between the financing costs and imports of base metals after allowing for prices and country risk. These results indicate that resource availability with respect to base metals is increased with a reduction in financing costs to market participants. The amount differs across the base metals where copper sees the highest reduction of 3.3 tons for an increase of short-term financing costs by one basis point. Furthermore, the effect differs across countries with the European Union’s states being highly dependent of imports in these materials. We interpret this at a firm level by considering the funding requirement during the import process and the relative sensitivity of market participants to financing costs. © 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Kernel smoothing and filtering techniques are undemanding in their data generation assumptions but have limitations where special interest attaches to more recent observations. A methodology is developed that addresses contingencies such as end correction and the kernel term structure within the same technology, namely scale invariant kernel compression. The framework is built around an entropic transformation of the standard uniform moving average, augmented with kernel compressions utilizing entropic weight redistribution. The techniques are illustrated with data drawn from climate change. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology to evaluate sovereign risk. Hereby, a value-based approach using different market measures is introduced. Design/methodology/approach – This study’s approach aims to provide a value-based assessment of sovereign risk, combining market measures from government bond, credit derivatives and other markets as well as economic indicators. Findings – The study finds that the assessment of sovereign risk is only possible when using information from different markets and adjusting according to the information included in these measures. Combining both market-based and economic information leads to a value-based evaluation of sovereign risk. Practical implications – The practical implications are given for any institution with sovereign risk on their asset side. In fact, part of this research was done for the German Actuarial Foundation which uses the recommendations of this paper for the insurance industry. Originality/value – The study’s approach is novel because it is the first to include several market-based and economic measures of a sovereign and combines it into a value-based assessment. © 2014, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

The notion of a stochastic 'convenience yield' to explain variations and reversals in the spot-forward premium is a common rationalisation in commodity market research. However, such variations may arise from causes more intrinsically related to the structure and cash flows of the extended commodity markets. An instance is where the market can be subject to disequilibrium phases, characterised by rationing or clearing impediments that interfere with arbitrage. These are likely to arise when market inventory is in short supply, so that disequilibrium switches can be based on the inventory/sales ratio. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Using the contingent claim approach and market data on sovereign credit default swaps we assess the drivers of a country's risk perception. Deriving market-based asset values for a set of advanced economies we gain insights into the capital markets' perspectives on sovereign creditworthiness. We find the market-based asset values to be positively influenced by debt and to be an early risk indicator for economic developments. In a cross-section analysis we identify drivers of the economic risk of countries. Clustering the countries according to their debt to asset value ratios provides further insights into the market perceptions of sovereign credit risk. For example we find that the asset values of countries with higher ratios react to changes in the global equity market. Countries with a lower ratio react more to the political stability within the country. © 2013 Elsevier Inc.

The rise and subsequent collapse of US house prices was one of the factors underlying the recent financial crisis. One could expect that the crisis brought increased attention to the housing market and thus led to stronger market reactions to house price news. We find that reactions indeed change, but with a peculiar twist: from September 2008 on, good news from the housing market are associated with falling US stock prices, and vice versa. The likely explanation, for which we provide cross-sectional evidence, is that falling house prices increased the market's trust in a government bailout, thereby increasing market valuations of firms that were expected to benefit from government rescue measures. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

Regulatory proposals that seek to limit or govern finance industry bonuses in the interests of systemic stability need to be grounded in the financial economics of producer surplus and its distribution. In this respect, existing treatments of economic agency in justifying large bonus awards are content to accept accounting Profit and Loss (P&L) numbers as a basis for the managerial bonus pool. We argue that managerial bonuses and shareholder dividends should be treated more symmetrically, and constrained by free cash flow criteria that capture producer surplus created by genuine managerial ability. Priority rules should apply, such that fair market value is a compensation for shareholder risk bearing and not a source of managerial surplus. The use of free cash flow conversion ratios neutralises the free option problem that has become a social irritant in public bailouts. © 2011 Taylor amp;& Francis.

The recent financial crisis manifested the criticism to rating agencies of being slow in adjusting their rating to current conditions. This paper examines the timeliness of rating changes and identifies factors which result in 'stickiness' of rating actions. Knowledge of the stickiness of rating agencies is a first step in designing a more appropriate rating system. Stickiness is characterized by not adjusting the rating even when a market-based estimate of default probability changes. Extending an econometric model of friction the migration policy is modelled in terms of thresholds which have to be crossed by default probability estimates before an up- or downgrade occurs. Default probability estimates have to change by two notches before the rating agency reacts. The timeliness differs across the rating spectrum and over the years. During periods with high defaults and for low credit quality firms agencies tend to rate more timely. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.