Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted on the assumption of mean squared error loss under which forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors serially uncorrelated at the single period horizon with increasing variance as the forecast...

Despite mounting empirical evidence to the contrary, the literature on predictability of stock returns almost uniformly assumes a time-invariant relationship between state variables and returns. In this paper we propose a two-stage approach for forecasting of financial return series that are...

This paper proposes new performance decomposition measures that allow one to analyse the sources of returns on the international equity holdings of a large cross-section of UK pension funds. Our results suggest that the pension funds earned negative returns both from international market timing...

This paper analyses the international equity holdings of a large panel of UK pension funds. We find considerable evidence of market timing activity, as illustrated by the funds' decision to scale back their investments in the US stock market during the 1990s. To explain this we model portfolio...

Despite pension fund managers being largely unconstrained in their investment decisions, this paper reports evidence of clustering in the performance of a large cross-section of UK pension fund managers around the median fund manager. This finding is explained in terms of the predominance of a...

We consider performance measurement and evaluation for managed funds. Similarities and differences−both in econometric practice and in interpretation of outcomes of empirical tests−between performance measurement and conventional asset pricing models are analyzed. We also discuss how...