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...

We propose a nonparametric Bayesian approach for the estimation of the pricing kernel. Historical stock returns and option market data are combined through the Dirichlet Process (DP) to construct an option-adjusted physical measure. The precision parameter of the DP process is calibrated to the...

Hedge funds offer desirable risk-return profiles; but we also find high management fees, lack of transparency and worse, very limited liquidity (they are often closed to new investors and disinvestment fees can be prohibitive). This creates an incentive to replicate the attractive features of...

Limited liability creates a conflict of interests between policyholders and shareholders of insurance companies. It provides shareholders with incentives to increase the risk of the insurer's assets and liabilities which, in turn, might reduce the value policyholders attach to and premiums they...

Wealth management constitutes an important aspect of today's banking world, but very little is known about what explains the differences among banks in their ability to attract new assets under management. Using a unique panel database of Swiss private banks, we test the hypothesis that the...

We analyze the carbon footprint and emissions of the Swiss National Bank's (SNB) U.S. equity portfolio and compare its carbon performance to those of the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, and to the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG). The SNB portfolio does as well as...

The statistical estimate of the branching ratio η of the Hawkes model, when fitted to windows of mid-price changes, has been reported to approach criticality (η = 1) as the fitting window becomes large. In this study -- using price changes from the EUR/USD currency pair traded on the...