Abstract

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays. My first paper re-examines the link between idiosyncratic risk and expected returns for a large sample of firms in both developed and emerging markets. Recent studies using Fama-French three factor models have shown a negative relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and expected returns for developed markets. This relationship has not been studied to date for emerging markets. This study relates the current-month’s idiosyncratic volatility to the subsequent month’s returns for a sample of both developed and emerging markets expanding benchmark factors by including both a momentum and a systematic liquidity risk component.

My second essay contributes to the important literature on the topic of the small capitalization stocks historical outperformance over large capitalization stocks by investigating the hypothesis that the small firm premium is related to macroeconomic and financial variables and that relationship is driven by the economic cycle in the United States and Canada. More specifically, this study employs recent advances in nonlinear time series models to explore the relationship between the small firm premium, and financial and macroeconomic variables in the Canadian and U.S. economies.

My third paper re-examines the findings of a recent research paper that suggested that market wide liquidity may act as a leading indicator to the economic cycle. Using several liquidity measures and various macroeconomic variables to proxy for the economic conditions, the paper presents evidence that stock market liquidity could forecast business cycles: A major decrease in the overall level of market liquidity could indicate weak economic growth in the subsequent months. However, the drawback in the analysis is that the relationship is investigated in a linear approach even though it has been proven that most macroeconomic variables follow non-linear dynamics. Employing similar liquidity measures and macroeconomic proxies, and two popular econometrics models that account for non-linear behavior, this study hence re-investigates the relationship between stock market liquidity and business cycles.