Speeding up the exchange does not necessarily improve liquidity. The price quotes of high-frequency market makers are more likely to meet speculative high-frequency "bandits", thus less likely to meet liquidity traders. The bid-ask spread is raised in response. The recursive dynamic model...

This paper features an analysis of the effectiveness of a range of portfolio diversification strategies as applied to a set of daily arithmetically compounded returns on a set of ten market indices representing the major European markets for a nine year period from the beginning of 2005 to the...

We study risk and return properties of capital structure arbitrage strategies aiming to profit from temporal mispricing between equity and credit default swaps (CDSs) of companies. We find that capital structure arbitrage provides an attractive annualized return of 24.35% on invested capital....

The relationship between excess returns and the dividend price ratio is known to be unstable. However, there is no consensus on the type of instability, i.e. few or many breaks. Differences in parameter instability affect the long-term investor in particular, as misspecification errors are...

A dynamic semi-parametric framework is proposed to study time variation in tail fatness of sovereign bond yield changes during the 2010-2012 euro area sovereign debt crisis measured at a high (15-minute) frequency. The framework builds on the Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) for modeling...

Cross-country differences in homeownership rates are large and persistent over time, with homeownership rates ranging from 44% in Switzerland to 83% in Spain. This paper investigates whether cultures-defined as behavioral attitudes passed across generations-may value homeownership differently,...

Consider the portfolio problem of choosing the mix between stocks and bonds under a downside risk constraint. Typically stock returns exhibit fatter tails than bonds corresponding to their greater downside risk. Downside risk criteria like the safety first criterion therefore often select corner...