This paper applies the mean-variance portfolio optimization (PO) approach and the stochastic dominance (SD) test to examine preferences for international diversification versus domestic diversification from American investors’ viewpoints. Our PO results imply that the domestic diversification...

Bharath and Shumway (2008) provide evidence that shows that it is the functional form of Merton’s (1974) distance to default (DD) model that makes it useful and important for predicting defaults. In this paper, we investigate whether the default predictability of the Merton DD model would be...

There is a large and growing literature on spillovers but no study that systematically evaluates the importance of spillovers for portfolio management. This paper provides such an analysis and demonstrates that spillovers are fully embedded in estimates of expected returns, variances, and...

This paper studies the historical time-varying dynamics of risk for individual stocks in the U.S. market. Total risk of an individual stock is decomposed into two components, systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk, and both components are studied separately. We start from the historical trend in...

In asset management, the portfolio leverage affects performance, and can be subject to constraints and operational limitations. Due to the possible leverage aversion of the investors, the comparison between portfolio performances can be incomplete or misleading. We propose a procedure to...

This paper aims to develop some static and conditional (dynamic) models to predict portfolio returns in the Borsa Istanbul (BIST) that are calibrated to combine the capital asset-pricing model (CAPM) and corporate governance quality. In our conditional model proposals, both the traditional CAPM...

I investigate the question of how to construct a benchmark replicating portfolio consisting of a subset of the benchmark’s components. I consider two approaches: a sequential stepwise regression and another method based on factor models of security returns´ first and second moments. The first...

The trend towards eliminating defined benefit (DB) pension plans in favour of defined contribution (DC) plans implies that increasing numbers of pension plan participants will bear the risk that final realized portfolio values may be insufficient to fund desired retirement cash flows. We compare...

In this paper, we construct a sample of news co-occurrences using big data technologies. We show that stocks that co-occur in news articles are less risky, bigger, and more covered by financial analysts, and economically-connected stocks are mentioned more often in the same news articles. We...

In this study, I apply a quantile regression model to investigate how gold returns respond to changes in various financial indicators. The model quantifies the asymmetric response of gold return in the tails of the distribution based on weekly data over the past 30 years. I conducted a...