We study how financial market effciency affects a measure of diversification of output across industrial sectors borrowed from the portfolio allocation literature. Using data on sector-level value added for a wide cross section of countries and for various levels of disaggregation, we construct...

Transaction-cost models in continuous-time markets are considered. Given that investors decide to buy or sell at certain time instants, we study the existence of trading strategies that reach a certain final wealth level in continuous-time markets, under the assumption that transaction costs,...

Undiversifiable (or systematic risk) has long been an enemy of investors. Many countercyclical strategies have been developed to counter this. However, like all insurance types, these strategies are generally costly to implement, and over time can significantly reduce portfolio returns in long...

This study investigates return and asymmetric volatility spillovers and dynamic correlations between the main and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) stock markets in Saudi Arabia and Egypt for the periods before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Return and volatility spillovers are modelled...

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...

Corporate bond returns in the major developed economies increase with risk, as measured by maturity and ratings. From a pricing perspective, we find little to no evidence against the World CAPM model, where the market consists out of equity, sovereign and corporate bonds. However, from a factor...

Earlier research has shown that euro-area primary public debt markets affect secondary markets. We find that more successful auctions of euro area public debt, as captured by higher bid-to-cover ratios, lead to lower secondary-market yields following the auctions. This effect is stronger when...

This paper assesses the performance of 355 actively managed Japanese Equity Mutual Funds between April 2011 and April 2016. The equal weight portfolio and Jensen’s alpha measures of active management provide strong evidence that Japanese Mutual Funds fail to outperform the benchmark...

In the field of portfolio management, practitioners are focusing increasingly on risk-based portfolios rather than on mean-variance portfolios. Risk-based portfolios are constructed based solely on covariance matrices, and include methods such as minimum variance (MV), risk parity (RP), and...

We analyze a novel alpha momentum strategy that invests in stocks based on three-factor alphas which we estimate using daily returns. The empirical analysis for the U.S. and for Europe shows that (i) past alpha has power in predicting the cross-section of stock returns; (ii) alpha momentum...