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 quantitative model to select hedge funds in the long-short equity sector. The selection strategy is verified on a survivorship-bias-free hedge fund database, from January 1990 to September 2002. We focus on the hedge funds acting exclusively in the U.S. market. We identify...

In the standard real options approach to investment under uncertainty, agents formulate optimal policies under the assumptions of risk neutrality or perfect capital markets. However in most situations, corporate executives face incomplete markets either because they receive compensation packages...

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...

Standard tests designed to identify mutual funds with non-zero alphas are problematic, in that they do not adequately account for the presence of lucky funds. Lucky funds have significant estimated alphas, while their true alphas are equal to zero. To address this issue, this paper quantifies...

In a financial market with one riskless asset and n risky assets following geometric Brownian motions, we solve the problem of a pension fund maximizing the expected CRRA utility of its terminal wealth. By considering a stochastic death time for a subscriber, we solve a unique problem for both...

We investigate the influence of various fundamental variables on a cross-section of credit default swap transaction data. Credit default swap rates can be seen as a superior proxy to credit risk than bond spreads are. Because we have transaction prices rather than quotes, we have thus...

We consider option pricing when dynamic portfolios are discretely rebalanced. The portfolio adjustments only occur after ¯xed relative changes in the stock price. The stock price follows a marked point process and the market is incomplete. We first characterisethe equivalent martingale...

The aim of the paper is to analyse the effects of different model specifications, within a general nested framework, on the valuation of defaultable bonds, and some credit derivatives. Assuming that the primitive variables such as the risk-free short rate, and the credit spread are affine...

This paper presents a simple approach to the pricing of options on spread and some arguments in favor of modelling the spread using its two components instead of the spread itself. We show that, even in a simple Gaussian setting, the spread should not be modelled directly, and that convergence...