This paper characterizes performance measures satisfying a set of proposed axioms. We develop four new measures consistent with the axioms and show that they improve on the economic properties of the Sharpe Ratio and the Gain-Loss Ratio. In our treatment, the performance measures, or the indices...

This paper studies the relationship between civil war and the value of firms in a poor, resource abundant country using microeconomic data for Angola. We focus on diamond mining firms and conduct an event study on the sudden end of the conflict, marked by the death of the rebel movement leader...

We analyze the pricing and informational efficiency of the Italian market for options written on the most important stock index, the MIB30. We find several indications inconsistent with the hypothesis that the Italian MIBO is an efficient market. We report that a striking percentage of the data...

This paper studies the effects of conflict onset on asset markets applying the event study methodology. We consider a sample of 112 conflicts during the period 1974-2004 and find that a sizeable fraction of them had a significant impact on stock market indices and on major commodity prices....

This paper studies the relationship between civil war and the value of firms in a poor, resource abundant country using microeconomic data for Angola. We focus on diamond mining firms and conduct an event study on the sudden end of the conflict, marked by the death of the rebel movement leader...

When a (locally) riskless asset does not trade, the market is necessarily incomplete and the risk-adjusted drift on any traded asset is equal to the drift on the minimum instantaneous variance portfolio, which we call the latent interest rate. Options can still be priced by replication if the...

We define the class of local Levy processes. These are Levy processes time changed by an inhomogeneous local speed function. The local speed function is a deterministic function of time and the level of the process itself. We show how to reverse engineer the local speed function from traded...

We analyse the equilibrium asset pricing implications for an economy with single period return exposures to explicit non-Gaussian systematic factors, that may be both skewed and long-tailed, and Gaussian idiosyncratic components. Investors maximize expected exponential utility and equilibrium...

The concept of the gamma of a financed return as the highest level of stress that a return distribution can withstand is introduced. The various stress levels passed describe convex cones of acceptable cash flows that start with positive expectation and finish with arbitrage at infinity. Stress...