This article studies time variation in the expected excess returns of traded claims on dividends, bonds, and stock indices for international markets. We introduce a novel dividend risk factor that complements the bond risk factor of Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). By aggregating over 4 regions (United States, United Kingdom, Eurozone, and Japan), we create global dividend and bond factors. Our global 2-factor model captures the excess returns of most Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) country indices, as well as a variety of other test assets. Our findings highlight the value of the information contained in dividend and bond forward curves and suggest substantial comovement in international risk premia.

[We analyze the location of stock trading for firms with a US cross-listing. The fraction of trading that occurs in the United States tends to be larger for companies from countries that are geographically close to the United States and feature low financial development and poor insider trading protection. For companies based in developed countries, trading volume in the United States is larger if the company is small, volatile, and technology-oriented, while this does not apply to emerging country firms. The domestic turnover rate increases in the cross-listing year and remains higher for firms based in developed markets, but not for emerging market firms. Domestic trading volume actually declines for companies from countries with poor enforcement of insider trading regulation]

Analysts in a bank's research department cover firms that have no relationship with the bank as well as companies in which the bank has a strategic interest. Officially, banks must establish Chinese Walls around their research departments to allow the analysts to work independently and to avoid the flow of insider information. We examine analyst behavior under long-term bank-firm relationships using ownership data and analysts' earnings per share forecasts for German companies from 1994 to 2001. We find evidence that is consistent with analysts reconciling their employers' interests with their own career concerns. They seem to use their information advantage strategically by releasing favorable and thereby more precise reports when the market underestimates earnings. In order not to jeopardize the bank-client relationship, they suppress negative information when the market is too optimistic. Combining situations where the market over- and underestimates earnings, we can replicate the unconditional positive bias in analyst forecasts found in the previous literature. Despite the bias in affiliated analysts' forecasts, they nonetheless selectively communicate valuable information to investors.

This article shows that, for major equity markets, the proportion of index values attributable to the first 5 years of dividends dropped substantially in the first quarter of 2020 and that this drop was not reversed by the end of the year. In the cross section, this breakdown of dividend smoothing due to COVID-19 was less severe for firms with higher operating cash flows and more positively coskewed stock returns, and it was more pronounced for those with higher leverage and in the financial sector. Heavy dividend cutters also experienced a substantial increase in exposure to systematic risk.

This paper derives a stochastic discount factor for currency-hedged government bonds of developed markets by projecting returns onto the unconditional mean–variance efficient (UMVE) portfolio. Priced risks of international bonds differ fundamentally from those of currencies. The UMVE portfolio achieves a Sharpe ratio over twice the average of individual markets, with the market price of risk peaking during crises and periods with high inflation dispersion. While bond returns exhibit a strong factor structure, common sources of variation are only weakly connected to priced risks. Hedging unpriced risks in naive or factor-based strategies significantly improves Sharpe ratios, even under portfolio weight constraints.

We analyze the location of stock trading for firms with a US cross-listing. The fraction of trading that occurs in the United States tends to be larger for companies from countries that are geographically close to the United States and feature low financial development and poor insider trading protection. For companies based in developed countries, trading volume in the United States is larger if the company is small, volatile, and technology-oriented, while this does not apply to emerging country firms. The domestic turnover rate increases in the cross-listing year and remains higher for firms based in developed markets, but not for emerging market firms. Domestic trading volume actually declines for companies from countries with poor enforcement of insider trading regulation.