We implement a long-horizon static and dynamic portfolio allocation involving a risk-free and a risky asset. This model is calibrated at a quarterly frequency for ten European countries. We also use maximum-likelihood estimates and Bayesian estimates to account for parameter uncertainty. We find...

The use of mixture distributions for modeling asset returns has a long history in finance. New methods of demonstrating support for the presence of mixtures in the multivariate case are provided. The use of a two-component multivariate normal mixture distribution, coupled with shrinkage via a...

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...

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...

Testing procedures for predictive regressions with lagged autoregressive variables imply a suboptimal inference in presence of small violations of ideal assumptions. We propose a novel testing framework resistant to such violations, which is consistent with nearly integrated regressors and...

A new multivariate time series model with various attractive properties is motivated and studied. By extending the CCC model in several ways, it allows for all the primary stylized facts of financial asset returns, including volatility clustering, non-normality (excess kurtosis and asymmetry),...

The CCC-GARCH model, and its dynamic correlation extensions, form the most important model class for multivariate asset returns. For multivariate density and portfolio risk forecasting, a drawback of these models is the underlying assumption of Gaussianity. This paper considers the so-called...

It is well-known in empirical nance that virtually all asset returns, whether monthly, daily, or intraday, are heavy-tailed and, particularly for stock returns, are mildly but often signi cantly negatively skewed. However, the tail indices, or maximally existing moments of the returns, can di er...

Average skewness, which is defined as the average of monthly skewness values across firms, performs well at predicting future market returns. This result still holds after controlling for the size or liquidity of the firms or for current business cycle conditions. We also find that average...

In this paper, we document evidence that downside betas tend to comove more than upside betas during a financial crisis, but upside betas tend to comove more than the downside betas during financial booms. We find that the asymmetry between Downside-Beta Comovement and Upside-Beta Comovement is...