Momentum strategies based on continuations in stock prices have become increas-ingly popular among academics, money managers, and investors in recent years. While there is little controversy on the profitability of momentum strategies, their implementation is afflicted with many difficulties....

In this paper we investigate the theoretical relation between financial leverage and stock returns in a dynamic world where both the corporate investment and finance decisions are endogenous. We find that the link between leverage and stock returns is more complex than the static textbook...

The aim of this paper is to study the impact of bankruptcy law on financing, investment, default and liquidation decisions of firms. We build a model in which a firm can finance its investment by issuing debt. The investment is risky. Because of risk, the firm may default. The firm manager takes...

This paper analyzes the important time variation in U.S. aggregate portfolio allocations. To do so, we first use flexible descriptions of preferences and investment opportunities to derive optimal decision rules that nest tactical, myopic, and strategic portfolio allocations. We then compare...

We study the influence of systematic probability misestimation on complexfinancial investment decisions on the context of structured financialproducts. Structured products have in recent years become more and morecomplex. We study the question whether this complexity might be a...

In the recent work of Dempster, Evstigneev and Taksar (2006) it has been shown that the von Neumann-Gale model of economic dynamics can serve as a convenient and natural framework for the analysis of questions of asset pricing and hedging under transaction costs. The present article focuses on a...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the Dow Jones index. First, we use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it is more powerful and not restricted only to the best...

This paper uses a simple model of mean-variance asset pricing with transactions costs to analyze one of the main empirical phenomena in stock market competition in the last years, the decrease of transaction costs. We endogenize transactions costs as variables strategically influenced by stock...

Municipal bonds trade in opaque, decentralized broker-dealer markets in which price information is costly to gather. Whether dealers in such a market operate competitively is an empirical issue, but a difficult one to study. Data in such markets is generally not centrally recorded. We analyze a...

A generalized correlated random walk is a process X_k of partial sums of random variables Y_j such that (X,Y) forms a Markov chain. For a sequence X^n of such processes where each Y^n_j takes only two values, we prove weak convergence to a diffusion process whose generator is explicitly...