The systematic risk is considered as one of the most important factors that influence the investment in financial assets. Usually, it is evaluated in the framework of the Capital Asset Price Model. The systematic risk associated to firm equities is affected by some firm’s characteristics,...

Public and private equity waves move together. Using quarterly cash-flow data for a large sample of venture capital and buyout funds from 1984-2010, we investigate the implications of this co-cyclicality for understanding private equity cash flows and performance. In the cross-section, varying...

Trillions of dollars are invested through index funds, exchange-traded funds, and other index derivatives. The benefits of index-linked investing are well-known, but the possible broader economic consequences are unstudied. I review research which suggests that index-linked investing is...

Insurance Industry is going through a very important stage of its transformation - the transition from the classical system of management into a risk-based management. These changes were launched in Europe by international organizations which deal with the development of the necessary...

Facing investment choices, investors may care more about potentially excess losses in a downtrend market than excess gains in an upside market. Conditional Sharpe ratios (CSR) are statistical ordinates of conditional stochastic dominance (CSD) that measure lower partial risk-adjusted excess...

We propose a new method of testing asset pricing models that relies on using quantities rather than prices or returns. We use the capital flows into and out of mutual funds to infer which risk model investors use. We derive a simple test statistic that allows us to infer, from a set of candidate...

When analyzing relative performance, especially at the institutional level, the traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models do not recognize vastly different and important activities as separate functions and therefore cannot identify which function may be the main source of inefficiency....

We develop a new method for detecting portfolio manager activity. Our method relies exclusively on portfolio returns and, consequently, avoids the pitfalls associated with disclosed portfolio holdings. We investigate the link between activity and performance of actively managed U.S. equity funds...

Credit ratings have become an indispensable part of the fundamental information infrastructure of credit markets. Credit ratings cover a wide range of issuers including governments, governmental organizations, municipalities, nonfinancial companies and financial institutions, and also cover...

This paper provides a taxonomy of market imperfections built around the economic forces underlying them. Market imperfections affect virtually every transaction in some way, generating costs which interfere with trades that rational individuals make, or would make in the absence of the...