The notable increase in international reserve holdings over the past decade and their use during the global financial crisis of 2008/2009 has sparked renewed interest in the analysis of the optimal level of reserve holdings, in particular in countries which are subject to sudden stops. Less...

We study how and to what extent private households are affected by the recent financial crisis and how their financial decisions are inuenced by this shock. Our analysis reveals that individuals with low levels of financial literacy are less likely to have invested in the stock market and thus...

The causes of the 2008 collapse and subsequent surge in global capital flows remain an open and highly controversial issue. Employing a factor model coupled with a dataset of high-frequency portfolio capital flows to 50 economies, the paper finds that common shocks - key crisis events as well as...

Mean-variance investing is all about diversification. Diversification considers assets holistically and exploits the interaction of assets with each other, rather than viewing assets in isolation. Holding a diversified portfolio allows investors to increase expected returns while reducing risks....

We identify flight-to-safety (FTS) days for 23 countries using only stock and bond returns and a model averaging approach. FTS days comprise less than 2% of the sample, and are associated with a 2.7% average bond-equity return differential and significant flows out of equity funds and into...

We evaluate popular measures of hedge fund tail risk such as maximum drawdown (MDD) and worst one-period loss, and prove theoretically that realized tail risk is a downward-biased estimator of true tail risk. The bias can be almost 100% using a reasonable calibration. That is, true tail risk can...

We investigate asset returns around banking crises in 44 advanced and emerging economies from 1960 to 2018. In contrast to the view that buying assets during banking crises is a profitable long-run strategy, we find returns of equity and other asset classes generally underperform after banking...

The investment fund sector has expanded dramatically since the crisis of 2008-2009. As the sector grows, so do the implications of its risk-taking for the wider financial system and real economy. This paper provides empirical evidence for the existence of widespread risk-taking incentives in the...

Factor investing asks: how well can a particular investor weather hard times relative to the average investor? Answering helps her reap long-run factor premiums by embracing risks that lose money during bad times, but make up for it the rest of the time with attractive rewards. When factor...

American university and college endowments now hold close to one-third of their portfolios in private equity and hedge funds. We estimate the implied beliefs of endowments about alternative assets' returns relative to equities and bonds. At the end of 2012, the typical endowment believes that...