In this paper we explore the theoretical and empirical problems of estimating average (excess) return and risk of US equities over various holding periods and sample periods. Our findings are relevant for performance evaluation, for estimating the historical equity risk premium, and for...

Aside from the aggregated information provided by price and quantity indexes, there is growing interest in index decompositions that reveal the contribution of each index component to overall index change. In this paper, we derive a “natural†decomposition of the Fisher price index...

When delegating an investment decisions to a professional manager, investors often anchor their mandate to a specific benchmark. The manager’s exposure to risk is controlled by means of a tracking error volatility constraint. It depends on market conditions whether this constraint is...

Large institutional investors allocate their funds over a number of classes (e.g. equity, fixed income and real estate), various geographical regions and different industries. In practice, these allocation decisions are usually made in a hierarchical (top-down), consecutive way. At the higher...

We present an analysis of the performance of the DAX, German's major stock market index, over the last two years. Our analysis is broader than conventional benchmark approaches because we study the properties of all feasible portfolios, i.e. portfolios composed given the same investment...

In this paper we present and illustrate using real-life data a framework for managing an investment portfolio in which the investment opportunities are described in terms of a set of attributes and part of this set is intended to capture the effects on society. Here we link with the emerging...

Most financial-economic decisions are made consciously, with a clear and constant drive to ???good???, ???better??? or even ???optimal??? decisions. Nevertheless, many decisions in practice do not earn these qualifications, despite the availability of financial economic theory, decision sciences...

For people working in finance, either in academia or in practice or in both, the combination of ?finance? and ?multiple criteria? is not obvious. However, we believe that many of the tools developed in the field of MCDM can contribute both to the quality of the financial economic decision making...

In this paper we explore the relevance of dividends in the total equity return over longer time horizons. In addition, we investigate the effects of different reinvestment assumptions of dividends. We use a unique set of revised and corrected US equity data series, comprising monthly prices and...

Revenue management is the practice of selecting those customers that generate the maximum revenue from a fixed and perishable capacity. Cargo revenue management differs from the well-known passenger revenue management problem by the fact that its capacity constraint is 2-dimensional, i.e. weight...