Abstract Behavioural finance has challenged many claims of efficient market hypothesis (EMH). Unfortunately many of these challenges are in the form of anecdotal evidence and lack quantification. This article uses market data together with some simple statistics to show that in practice certain...

In this fifth article in the Economists’ Hubris series, we investigate the practical applications of eight papers that won best-article awards in 2008 and 2009 from the Journal of Finance or the Journal of Financial Economics, the two leading journals in finance. We find that these articles...

In this paper, we investigate whether the international version of CAPM can price rational and irrational sentiments of U.S. individual and institutional investor sentiments. The results show that the CAPM prices rational sentiments driven by fundamentals and irrational sentiments not driven by...

We propose an alternative to the conventional risk finance paradigm of enterprise risk management that accounts for not only a loss portfolio’s expected frequency and expected severity, but also its “risk” as captured by an appropriate measure of dispersion/spread. This new paradigm is...

CoCos are contingently convertible debt securities. They are an infant reform instrument that grew out of the 2007-09 crisis. As hybrid capital, they convert to common equity tier 1 (CET1) outside bankruptcy when a built-in trigger level of the regulatory capital ratio with risk-weighted assets...

The complex dynamics of world financial markets yield inherent uncertainty and the prospect of periods of enhanced volatility. The turbulent global economic and regulatory environment of the past few years has certainly illustrated this reality. As investment managers interpret clients’...

Alan Greenspan’s paper (March 2010) presents his retrospective view of the crisis. His theme has several parts. First, the housing price bubble, its subsequent collapse, and the financial crisis were not predicted either by the market, the Fed, the IMF, or the regulators in the years leading...

This paper reports an investigation into measures of portfolio performance. The Sharpe ratio is the natural performance measure when asset returns come from any elliptically symmetric distribution, regardless of the investor utility function and subject only to regularity conditions. Under such...

Assuming a client’s goals, resources, and constraints have been clearly identified, when constructing an asset allocation instead of using a generic efficient frontier a client should have his or her own efficient frontier. What is efficient for one person may not be efficient for another. In...

It has become almost conventional wisdom that investors should avoid funds with high expense ratios. Like many nuggets of conventional wisdom, there is some truth, but many exceptions: some of the best funds come at the price of higher expense ratios. Financial planners need this type of...