2. Universidad Cardenal Herrera-CEU

Institutional investors often have to decide which strategy to use across international business cycles. This is especially important during economic and financial crises. The exogenous nature of the outbreak of the dramatic COVID-19 crisis represents a unique opportunity to understand the performance of risk factors during severe economic times across international stock markets. Even more important is to analyze how these factors behave across very different economic crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Recession. Although, the overall results show that the momentum and quality factors are the winners, with the value factor as the loser, this research also reports different responses of factors across crises and countries. The size, value, and defensive factors tend to perform worse during the health crisis relative to the Great Recession, while the momentum factor shows a poor performance during the financial crisis, but a positive one during the outbreak of COVID-19. The quality factor is an extraordinary defensive factor in both crises. Similarly, this paper reports heterogeneous responses of option-implied expected market risk premia across alternative stock market indices, and between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 crisis.

Actualmente, existen alrededor de 1000 millones de hambrientos en el mundo, una cifra que se ha incrementado considerablemente desde 873 millones que había en el periodo 2004-2006. Este aumento de los hambrientos está sujeto a una serie de causas que tienen que ver con la acción humana o la inacción ante este problema. Esta cifra parece que está lejos de reducirse, más teniendo en cuenta la crisis actual, justificando la acción inmediata para crear medidas que disminuyan el hambre. En este contexto, pretendemos explorar diversas causas que motivan el hambre, así como posibles soluciones que puedan mitigarla. Al ser un fenómeno tan multidimensional y sujeto a ideología, resulta difícil abordar tanto causas como soluciones. Conscientes de esta dificultad, destacamos diversas causas a nivel económico y político, y proponemos como solución principal impulsar al ser humano como una finalidad y no como un objeto de los mercados y procesos económicos. / There are around 1,020 millions of hungry people in the world. This figure has considerably increased from 2004-2006, when the hungry people were 873 millions. The increase is caused by a series of human actions or inactions towards this problem. In a global crisis framework, this figure seems to be far from decreasing, justifying the immediate action in order to reduce hunger. In this context, our objective is to explore several causes that motivate the formation of hunger, as well as possible solutions to reduce it. As it is a complex phenomenon and subject to ideologies, it is difficult to identify clear causes and solutions. Conscious of this limitation, we highlight several causes at an economic and political level, and we propose as a main solution to set the human being as a goal and not as a subject of markets and economic processes.

El presente artículo pretende dar una explicación razonada sobre la persistencia de los ciclos económicos a lo largo del tiempo. Esto implica hablar sobre las crisis recurrentes que estos ciclos implican y ante las que algunos piensan que no se puede hacer nada (aunque esta impresión no es correcta). La pretensión de este análisis es ver cómo las enseñanzas sociales de la Iglesia nos pueden aportar pistas que nos permitan orientar la economía en otra dirección que, si bien no evite del todo los ciclos, al menos los aminore y suavice sus consecuencias más negativas.