We develop a general equilibrium model of a production economy which has a risky production technology as well as a growth option to expand the scale of the productive sector of the economy. We show that when confronted with growth options, the representative consumer may sharply alter...

If debt capacity is defined as the incremental debt that is optimally associated with an additional asset, then the debt capacity of growth options is negative. Underinvestment costs of debt increase and free cash flow benefits of debt fall with additional growth options. Thus, if firm value...

In this paper we show the advantages of staged investments for venture capitalists. We develop an option-pricing model that enables to evaluate the flexibility acquired by a venture capitalist when he stages his investment process. Instead of investing a fixed amount at the beginning of the...

We present a model in which a sovereign country optimally decides on its consumption and investment policies as well as on the optimal time to default. In the paper we allow the sovereign borrower to keep the fraction of its augmented wealth in so-called international reserves. We further assume...

We develop a new methodology to measure conditional dependency between time series each driven by complicated marginal distributions. We achieve this by using copula functions that link marginal distributions, and by expressing the parameter of the copula as a function of predetermined...

To obtain the maximum benefits from diversification, financial theory suggests that investors should invest internationally because of the larger potential for risk reduction stemming from the lower correlation exisiting between assets of different countries. The question that we raise in this...

This paper addresses whether country allocation provides benefits over industry allocation in a sample of European country and industry indexes. Strategy performance is compared using a mean-variance spanning test. We find that, for investors with low risk aversion, industry allocation is as...

We use constrained cross-section regressions to disentangle the effects of various factors on international real estate security returns. Besides a common factor, pure country, property type, size, and value/growth factors are considered. The value/growth measure that is used in this paper...

The Omega performance measure is equiped with the original family of Johnson distributions. Explicit representations for Omega or Sharpe with all four Johnson cumulated densities were derived to construct portfolios with respect to 4 mutually independent moments. Additionally, decompositions of...

We analyze the problem of real optimal asset allocation for a pension fund maximising the expected CRRA utility of its real disposable wealth. The financial horizon of the analysis coincides with the random death time of a representative subscriber. We consider a very general setting where there...