In this paper we analyze the link between stock market performance and macroe conomic performance for a large number of countries. We study the short-run and long-run relationships and find that stock market returns do not coherently predict future macroeconomic changes for the majority of...

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has rekindled debate about the desirability of governmental interference in asset markets – either through the operation of policy levers, or, through the chosen institutional setup. In this paper we quantify economic costs due to mispricing of real assets in...

The copula function defines the degree of dependence and the structure of dependence. This paper proposes an alternative framework to decompose the dependence using quantile regression. It is demonstrated that the methodology provides a detailed picture of dependence including asymmetric and...

In order to explain the incidence of Granger causality between indices from the futures and the underlying cash market, as reported by numerous empirical studies in the literature, it is important to account for mean and volatility (second-order) persistence effects in the data. Further, there...

This paper builds upon the authors' previous work on transformation of the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) model of the term structure of interest rates to state space form for a fairly general class of volatility specification including stochastic variables. Estimation of this volatility function is...

Gold has been a store of value for centuries and a safe haven for investors in the past decades. However, the increased investment in gold for speculative or hedging purposes has changed the safe haven property. We demonstrate theoretically and empirically that investor behaviour has the...

We study two different safe haven assets, US government bonds and gold, and examine how the price changes of these assets can be used to infer investor behavior under uncertainty. We find that investors are ambiguity-averse, that is they buy gold when faced with extreme uncertainty about the...

We construct a time-varying factor model of hedge fund returns that accounts for market risk, leverage, illiquidity and tail events. We also adjust for database biases arising from voluntary self-reporting. Using a constant beta model, we find no evidence of excess returns for the average hedge...

Little empirical work has been done on the return properties of infrastructure as an asset class despite increased allocations by institutional investors. Managers claim infrastructure investments offer real return benefits via a combination of monopolistic and defensive assets. We build a...

Although mutual fund performance has been dissected from almost every angle, very little attention has been paid to the connection between the actual active decisions made by management and the subsequent performance outcomes. In this paper we use information on institutional mutual funds to...