Classical asset allocation methods have assumed that the distribution of asset returns is smooth, well behaved with stable statistical moments over time. The distribution is assumed to have constant moments with e.g., Gaussian distribution that can be conveniently parameterised by the first two...

News carry information of market moves. The gargantuan plethora of opinions, facts and tweets on financial business offers the opportunity to test and analyze the influence of such text sources on future directions of stocks. It also creates though the necessity to distill via statistical...

A great proportion of stock dynamics can be explained using publicly available information. The relationship between dynamics and public information may be of nonlinear character. In this paper we offer an approach to stock picking by employing so-called decision trees and applying them to XETRA...

This study provides a comprehensive overview of the use of credit default swaps by U.S. corporate bond funds and analyzes in detail whether certain characteristics of managers, in addition to the fundamentals of a fund, determine how their use these credit derivatives. Results suggest that a...

This study analyzes the loss potential arising from investments into CDS for a sample of large U.S. and German mutual funds. Further, it investigates whether the comments funds make on CDS use in periodic fund reports are consistent with the disclosed CDS holdings. For several funds in the U.S.,...

This study analyzes current regulation with respect to the use of derivatives and leverage by mutual funds in the U.S. and Germany. After presenting a detailed overview of U.S. and German regulations, this study thoroughly compares the level of flexibility funds have in both countries. I find...

Supported by several recent investigations the empirical pricing kernel paradox might be considered as a stylized fact. In Chabi-Yo et al. (2008) simulation studies have been presented which suggest that this paradox might be caused by regime switching of stock prices in financial markets....

Pricing kernels play a major role in quantifying risk aversion and investors' preferences. Several empirical studies reported that pricing kernels exhibit a common pattern across different markets. Mostly visual inspection and occasionally numerically summarise are used to make comparison. With...

Supported by several recent investigations, the empirical pricing kernel (EPK) puzzle might be considered a stylized fact. Based on an economic model with state dependent preferences for the financial investors, we want to emphasize a microeconomic view that succeeds in explaining the puzzle. We...

This paper employs numerical simulations of the Park and Sabourian (2011) herd model to derive new theory-based predictions for how information risk and market stress influence aggregate herding intensity. We test these predictions empirically using a comprehensive data set of highfrequency and...