Diversification opportunities in Euroland appear to have improved significantly since the advent of the euro, thus invalidating the prospects identified in the last years of the convergence-to-EMU period. We identify low frequency movements in the time series of return dispersions suggestive 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...

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...

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...

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

This research addresses whether geographic diversification provides benefits over industry diversification in a sample of European country and industry indexes. The methodology allows performance comparisons with short-selling constraints, upper and lower bounds, and many benchmarks. In the...