How does bank capital regulation affect the design of credit derivative contracts? How does the opacity of the OTC credit derivative markets affect these contracts? In this paper we address these issues and characterize the optimal security design in several settings. We show that both the level...

We address the issue of the efficiency of household portfolios in the presence of housing risk. We treat housing stock as an asset and rents as a stochastic liability stream: over the life-cycle, households can be short or long in their net housing position. Efficient financial portfolios are...

Have Italian mutual funds been able to generate “extra-return”? Were some of them able to persistently beat the competitors? In this paper we address these questions and provide a detailed and systematic performance and return persistence analysis of the Italian equity mutual funds. We show...

Standard tests of portfolio efficiency neglect the existence of illiquid wealth. The most important illiquid asset in household portfolios is housing: if housing stock adjustments are infrequent, optimal portfolios in periods of no adjustment are affected by housing price risk through a hedge...

In a mean-variance economy where controlling shareholders can divert profits, equity ownership is more concentrated the higher the stock returns correlation. A higher returns correlation reduces the benefits of diversification, giving rise to both a higher investment by the controlling...

Have Italian mutual funds been able to generate "extra-return"? Were some of them able to persistently beat the competitors? In this paper we address thee question and provide a detailed and systematic performance and return persistence analysis of the Italian equity mutual funds. We show that,...

This paper analyzes the sovereign risk contagion using credit default swaps (CDS) and bond premiums for the major eurozone countries. By emphasizing several econometric approaches (nonlinear regression, quantile regression and Bayesian quantile regression with heteroskedasticity) we show that...

This paper investigates the impact of a financial turmoil on the performances of traditional, and naive, asset allocation strategies. We compare over a long time span (lasting for the last 60 years) the 1/N portfolio with mean-variance optimal portfolio strategies. Our analyses consider several...

This paper studies the risk spillover among US Industrial Sectors and focuses on the connection between credit and liquidity risks. The proposed methodology is based on quantile regressions and considers the movements of CDS Industrial Sector Indices depending on common risk factors such as...

We propose several econometric measures of connectedness based on principal-components analysis and Granger-causality networks, and apply them to the monthly returns of hedge funds, banks, broker/dealers, and insurance companies. We find that all four sectors have become highly interrelated over...