The surge in international asset trade since the early 1990s has lead to renewed interest in models with international portfolio choice, an aspect that was largely cast aside when the ad-hoc portfolio balance models of the 1970s were replaced bymodels of optimizing agents. We develop the...

We provide a direct estimate of the magnitude of agency costs in U.S. publicly-held firms. Using a sample of 1,307 firms in 1992-1997, we compute an explicit performance benchmark that compares a firm’s actual Tobin’s Q to the Q∗ of a hypothetical fully-efficient firm having the same...

We identify local and global factors across international bond markets that arepoorly spanned by the traditional level, slope and curvature factors but havestrong forecasting power for future bond excess returns. Local and global fac-tors are jointly signicant predictors of bond returns, where...

This paper introduces an expected value estimator with expert knowledge to the robust estimation of sovereign rating transitions which are characterised by few observations. Ourestimates of default premia within Mexican, Colombian and Brazilian Eurobond yield spreads provide a better fit than...

Due to their underlying assumptions, the standard concepts of risk aversion and preference for the present are generally defined separately and represented by scalar measures, and this implies many shortcomings. More specifically, if measured by a scalar, the risk aversion remains unchanged,...

In this paper, we consider an incomplete market framework and explain how to use jointly observed prices of the underlying asset and of some derivatives written on this assetfor an efficient pricing of other derivatives. This question involves two types of moment restrictions, which can be...

Credit Default Swaps (CDS) are in the process of becoming, liquid and extremelyinformative instruments of default risk. Yet, default swap market has severalnovel aspects that have not received much attention. In this paper we studyan aspect of CDS´s that relates to the prediction of financial...

CEO compensation has increased substantially over the past 15 years, but so has forcedturnover. Motivated by this observation, we investigate whether part of the developmentof CEO pay can be explained by a premium which compensates CEOs for increased job risk.We ¯nd that for the CEOs of the...

Considered here is on-line portfolio management aimed at maximizing the long-run growth of financial wealth. The portfolio is repeatedly rebalanced in response to observed returns on diverse assets. Suppose statistical information and related methods are not available - or deemed too diffcult....