We study the exposure of mortgage borrowers in Switzerland to interest rate, income and house price risks and examine how the households' choice of risky mortgages is related to individual interest rate expectations and risk-aversion. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of household...

While there is a large literature documenting the profitability of momentum strategies, their implementation is afflicted with many difficulties. Most importantly, high turnover and costs to hold short positions, especially in small-cap stocks, result in high transaction costs. We restrict our...

This paper investigates the alpha generation of the hedge fund industry based on a recent sample compiled from the Lipper/TASS database covering the time period from January 1994 to September 2008. We find a positive average hedge fund alpha in the cross-section for the majority of strategies...

We develop a new systematic tail risk measure for equity-oriented hedge funds to examine the impact of tail risk on fund performance and to identify the sources of tail risk. We find that tail risk affects the cross-sectional variation in fund returns, and investments in both, tail-sensitive...

Contrary to the common wisdom that asset prices are barely possible to forecast, we show that that high and low prices of equity shares are largely predictable. We propose to model them using a simple implementation of a fractional vector autoregressive model with error correction (FVECM). This...

The risk of infrastructure investments is driven by unique factors that cannot be well described by standard asset class factor models. We thus create a nine-factor model based on infrastructure-specific risk exposure, i.e., market risk, size, value, momentum, cashflow volatility, leverage,...

We investigate hedge fund firms' unobserved performance (UP), measured as the risk-adjusted return difference between a fund firm's reported return and hypothetical portfolio return derived from its disclosed long equity holdings. Fund firms with high UP outperform those with low UP by 7.2% p.a....

We apply the GARCH-MIDAS framework to forecast the daily, weekly, and monthly volatility of five highly capitalized Cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Etherium, Litecoin, Ripple, and Stellar) as well as the Cryptocurrency index CRIX. Based on the prediction quality, we determine the most important...

We investigate the relationship between a mutual fund’s variation in systematic risk factor exposures and its future performance. Using a dynamic state space version of Carhart (1997)’s four factor model to capture risk factor variation, we find that funds with volatile risk factor exposures...

We propose an averaging rule that combines established minimum-variance strategies to minimize the expected out-of-sample variance. Our rule overcomes the problem of selecting the “best” strategy ex-ante and diversifies remaining estimation errors of the single strategies included in the...