Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

We develop and implement methods for determining whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for prospect investors. We formulate a new testing procedure for prospect spanning for two nested portfolio sets based on subsampling and...

Using properties of the cdf of a random variable defined as a saddle-type point of a real valued continuous stochastic process, we derive first-order asymptotic properties of tests for stochastic spanning w.r.t. a stochastic dominance relation. First, we define the concept of Markowitz...

We derive nonparametric tests of symmetry using asymmetric kernels with either shrinking or fixed bandwidths. We show how to extend the approach to examine conditional symmetry by deriving conditions under which our tests are applicable to residuals from semiparametric models with a...

We develop a test of equality between two dependence structures estimated through empirical copulas. We provide inference for independent or paired samples. The multiplier central limit theorem is used for calculating p-values of the Crameacute;r-von Mises test statistic. Finite sample properties...

This chapter surveys recent econometric methodologies for inference in large dimensional conditional factor models in finance. Changes in the business cycle and asset characteristics induce time variation in factor loadings and risk premia to be accounted for. The growing trend in the use of...

We develop theory of a novel fast bootstrap for dependent data. Our scheme deploys i.i.d. resampling of smoothed moment indicators. We characterize the class of parametric and semiparametric estimation problems for which the method is valid. We show the asymptotic re refinements of the new...

We build a simple diagnostic criterion for approximate factor structure in large panel datasets. Given observable factors, the criterion checks whether the errors are weakly cross-sectionally correlated or share at least one unobservable common factor (interactive effects). A general version...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the DJIA index from 1897 to 2011, and use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more outperforming rules which allows...

This paper develops a simple technique that controls for ldquo;false discoveries,rdquo; or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone. Our approach precisely separates funds into (1) unskilled, (2) zero-alpha, and (3) skilled funds, even with dependencies in cross-fund estimated...