This paper examines the ability of balanced pension plan managers to successfully time the equity and bond market and select the appropriate assets within these markets. In order to evaluate both market timing abilities in these balanced pension plans, we extend the traditional equity market...

This Paper assesses the ability of international asset pricing models to explain the cross-sectional variation in expected returns. All the models considered seem to capture national market returns fairly well. Global portfolios sorted on earnings-price ratio and market value, however, pose a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the market timing skills displayed by hedge fund managers during the 2007-08 financial crisis. Design/methodology/approach – The performance of a market timer can be measured through the 1966 Treynor and Mazuy model,...

We decompose the conditional expected mutual fund return in five parts. Two parts, selectivity and expert market timing, can be attributed to manager skill, and three to variation in market exposure that can be achieved by private investors as well. The dynamic model that we use to estimate the...

In this paper, we analyze the economic value of predicting stock index returns as well as volatility. On the basis of simple linear models, estimated recursively, we produce genuine out-of-sample forecasts for the return on the S&P 500 index and its volatility. Using monthly data from 1954 to...

This paper analyses the international equity holdings of a large panel of UK pension funds. We find considerable evidence of market timing activity, as illustrated by the funds' decision to scale back their investments in the US stock market during the 1990s. To explain this we model portfolio...

Using a sample that provides unprecedented detail on foreign listings, new listings, and delistings for 29 exchanges in 24 countries starting from the early 1980s, we document a growing tendency of listings to concentrate in the U.S. and the U.K. and large changes in all exchanges’ ability to...

This paper provides a new look at the timing of mutual fund investors. We re-examine the relationship between investors' aggregate net flows into and out of the funds and the returns of the funds in subsequent periods. The negative relationship that we find (using monthly data of aggregate US...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how hedge fund database biases developed during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Design/methodology/approach – The sample consists of 8,935 hedge funds from the Lipper TASS Hedge Fund Database for the January 2002-September 2010 time period....

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to study performance and market timing ability of equity real estate investment trusts (REITs). Design/methodology/approach - The authors use classical regression-based framework and their multi-index, multifactor, and conditional extensions to jointly...