This paper examines the dynamic relationship between the oil market and stock markets from two perspectives: dependence between the crude oil market (WTI) and stock markets of the US and China, and volatility spillovers between them during 1991-2016. We further analyze structural breaks of market dependences and consider the extent of their influence on such relationships. Our vine-copula results show that the dependences between the three paired markets, WTI-US, WTI-China and US-China, vary dynamically across the six identified structural break periods. In particular, the dependence between WTI-US is stronger and more volatile than that between WTI-China during most of the periods. The dependence between US-China remains at a lower level in the earlier periods, but increases in the final period. Our VAR-BEKK-GARCH results demonstrate distinctive volatility spillovers across these periods, with varying directionality, in response to the structural changes. Overall, our results indicate that the oil market stimulates rapid and continual fluctuations in market dependences, which become manifest most acutely in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, demonstrating the increasing interdependence between the oil and stock markets. Further, the growing influence of China on the dynamics of these relationships, in the period following the Great Recession, presents evidence that it begins to assume an increasingly important role in global economic recovery.

This paper is the result of a crowdsourced effort to surface perspectives on the present and future direction of international finance. The authors are researchers in financial economics who attended the INFINITI 2017 conference in the University of Valencia in June 2017 and who participated in the crowdsourcing via the Overleaf platform. This paper highlights the actual state of scientific knowledge in a multitude of fields in finance and proposes different directions for future research.

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We investigate US hedge funds' performance. Our proposed model contains exogenous and endogenous break points, based on business cycles and on a regime switching process conditional on different states of the market. During difficult market conditions most hedge fund strategies do not provide significant alphas. At such times hedge funds reduce both the number of their exposures to different asset classes and their portfolio allocations, while some strategies even reverse their exposures. Directional strategies share more common exposures under all market conditions compared to non-directional strategies. Factors related to commodity asset classes are more common during these difficult conditions whereas factors related to equity asset classes are most common during good market conditions. Falling stock markets are harsher than recessions for hedge funds.

We survey articles on hedge funds' performance persistence and fundamental factors from the mid-1990s to the present. For performance persistence, we present some pioneering studies that contradict previous findings that hedge funds' performance is a short term matter. We discuss recent innovative studies that examine the size, age, performance fees and other factors to give a 360° view of hedge funds' performance attribution. Small funds, younger funds and funds with high performance fees all outperform the opposite. Long lockup period funds tend to outperform short lockups and domiciled funds tend to outperform offshore funds. This is the first survey of recent innovative and challenging studies into hedge funds' performance attribution, and it should be particularly useful to investors trying to choose between hedge funds.