Annuities are perceived as being illiquid financial instruments, and this has limited their attractiveness to consumers and inclusion in financial models. However, short positions in annuities can be replicated using life insurance and debt, permitting long positions in annuities to be offset,...

We examine the daily activity and performance of a large panel of individual investors in Sweden's Premium Pension System in the period 2000 to 2010. We find that active investors outperform passive investors, and that there is a causal effect of fund changes on performance. Chosen funds...

Human activities widely exhibit a power-law distribution. Considering stock trading as a typical human activity in the financial domain, the first aim of this paper is to validate whether the well-known power-law distribution can be observed in this activity. Interestingly, this paper determines...

This study examined momentum profitability in Australia, providing further evidence for intermediate-term momentum profitability. Using data spanning different market states, we found that momentum was stronger after the global financial crisis. We also examined industry-level momentum...

We develop a new methodology to estimate abnormal performance and risk exposure of non-traded assets from cashflows. Our methodology extends the standard internal rate of return approach to a dynamic setting. The small-sample properties are validated using a simulation study. We apply the method...

We introduce a methodology to estimate the historical time-series of returns to investment in private equity funds. The approach requires only an unbalanced panel of cash contributions and distributions accruing to limited partners, and is robust to sparse data. We decompose private equity...

Background: The present study examines the short term dynamics and long term equilibrium relationship among the stock markets of 17 countries in Western Europe as well as the world market, using time series techniques. Methods: Weekly returns of market benchmark indices of the respective...

We identify flight-to-safety (FTS) days for 23 countries using only stock and bond returns and a model averaging approach. FTS days comprise less than 2% of the sample, and are associated with a 2.7% average bond-equity return differential and significant flows out of equity funds and into...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households' investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...

This study examines the relationship between positive and negative investor sentiments and stock market returns and volatility in Group of 20 countries using various methods, including panel regression with fixed effects, panel quantile regressions, a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model,...