Japan has experienced turbulent behavior of land prices after World War II, especially after 1985. This paper first examines the explanatory power of a simple present-value model and shows its limitation. We then investigate two additional (not mutually exclusive) factors affecting the Japanese...

Purpose – Existing empirical studies that document momentum trading strategies do not provide any insight on how investors choose the time horizon that is used to compute the past stock returns. Indeed, since past returns over overlapping time periods are positively correlated, it is hard to...

The aim of this book is to document, on a solid and convincing foundation, two public policy mistakes of the United States Government that have been extremely costly. First, the failure to combine stocks with long-term government bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund, the way other nations do,...

This book teaches financial engineering in an innovative way: by providing tools and a point of view to quickly and easily solve real front-office problems. Projects and simulations are not just exercises in this book, but its heart and soul. You will not only learn how to do state-of-the-art...

This paper examines the movements of the Distance to Default (DD), a market-based measure of corporate default risk, of eight failed Japanese banks in order to evaluate the predictive power of the DD measure for bank failures. The DD became smaller in anticipation of failure in many cases. The...

Searching for an explanation for investment grades assigned to virtually bankrupt subnational governments in LDCs, we study the determinants of bond ratings for municipalities in Mexico. Our data set includes ratings from three agencies: S&P, Fitch, and Moody´s. To control for selectivity in...

Markov chains have experienced a surge of economic interest in the form of behavioral agent-based models that aim at explaining the statistical regularities of financial returns. We review some of the relevant mathematical facts and show how they apply to agent-based herding models, with the...

We analyze the effects of the observed increased share of delegated capital for trading strategies and equilibrium prices by introducing delegation into a standard Lucas exchange economy. In equilibrium, some investors trade on their own account, but others decide to delegate trading to...

This paper examines mutual fund managers' ability to time market-wide liquidity. Using the CRSP mutual fund database, we find strong evidence that over the 1974–2009 period, mutual fund managers demonstrate the ability to time market liquidity at both the portfolio level and the individual...

We model portfolio weights as a function of latent factors that summarize the information in a large number of economic variables. This approach (hereafter diffusion index approach) offers the opportunity to exploit a much richer information base to improve portfolio selection. We use factor...