We introduce a methodology for measuring systemic importance. Investors care about systemicimportance because this knowledge may enable them to assess their portfolio’s vulnerability toparticular events and, if warranted, to pursue defensive strategies. Policymakers also need thisinformation...

The U. S. government's failure to provide adequate oversight and prudent regulation of the financial markets, together with excessive risk taking by some financial institutions, pushed the world financial system to the brink of systemic failure in 2008. As a consequence of this near catastrophe,...

The Sharpe ratio is the most widely used metric for comparing performance across investment managers and strategies, and the information ratio is as commonly used to evaluate performance relative to a benchmark. Although it is widely recognized that non-linearities arising from the inclusion of...

Institutional investors usually employ mean-variance analysis to determine optimal portfolio weights. Almost immediately upon implementation, however, the portfolio's weights become sub-optimal as changes in asset prices cause the portfolio to drift away from the optimal targets. In an idealized...

The relative benefits of country diversification and industry diversification are critical for investors, portfolio managers, and investment banks. The unification of Europe has had a substantial impact on these relative benefits and the ultimate goal of this article is to evaluate their...

Hedge funds have return peculiarities not commonly associated with traditional investment vehicles. Specifically, hedge funds seem more inclined to produce return distributions with significantly non-normal skewness and kurtosis. There is also growing acceptance of the notion that investor...

Should investors in emerging markets focus on diversifying across countries or diversifying across industries? This question, widely debated in developed markets, and particularly in Europe, has received little attention in emerging markets. Using a normative approach that disentangles the...

Should investors in emerging markets focus on diversifying across countries or diversifying across industries? This question, widely debated in developed markets, and particularly in Europe, has received little attention in emerging markets. Using a normative approach that disentangles the...

We present a recent innovation to portfolio construction called full-scale optimization. In contrast to mean-variance analysis, which assumes that returns are normally distributed or that investors have quadratic utility, full-scale optimization identifies the optimal portfolio given any set of...