We investigate the diversification benefits and optimal portfolio allocation across different US asset classes. Our results from applying the principal component analysis (PCA) show that although there is an increasing trend in market integration, five major financial markets (equities, bonds,...

How should one evaluate investment projects whose CCAPM betas are uncertain? This question is particularly crucial for projects yielding long-lasting impacts on the economy, as is the case for example for many green investments. We define the notion of a certainty equivalent beta. We show that...

Because of the uncertainty about how to model the growth process of our economy, there is still much confusion about which discount rates should be used to evaluate actions having long-lasting impacts, as in the contexts of climate change, social security reforms or large public infrastructures...

This article attempts to examine whether the equity premium in the United States can be predicted from a comprehensive set of 18 economic and financial predictors over a monthly out-of-sample period of 2000:2 to 2011:12, using an in-sample period of 1990:2-2000:1. To do so, we consider, in...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

We examine the long term investment problem, under stochastic interest and inflation rates and incompleteness. Four basic financial assets are available on the financial market: a money market account (the cash), a real consumption good, a financial stock index and a bond with constant maturity....

The stochastic dominance ordering over probability distributions is one of the most familiar concepts in economic and financial analysis. One difficulty with stochastic dominance is that many distributions are not ranked at all, even when arbitrarily close to other distributions that are....

Institutional investors are predominant on the financial markets and are becoming more active in their portfolio management. This article attempts to enhance our understanding of the incidence of shareholder activism on market reaction in the wake of seve

Market efficiency is among the foremost criteria for making investment decisions when foreign investors attempt to allocate their funds to emerging market assets. If the markets under consideration are efficient, quoted prices of the assets will serve as useful and reliable signals for capital...