This paper is the first to present a two-stage peer group benchmarking approach to evaluate the performance of hedge funds. We present different ways of orthogonalizing the peer group benchark and discuss their propperties in general. We propose to orthogonalize the benchmark against all other...

Identifying a suitable benchmark is essential when testing asset pricing models, measuring the performance of active investors, or providing market proxy portfolios for passive investors. Concern that increased domination of capitalization weighted stock indices by a few large firms will lead to...

In the debate whether country factors are typically more variable than sector factors, sparked off by e.g. Roll (1991) and Heston and Rouwenhorst (1994), one of the few uncontested facts is that the addition of emerging markets (EMs) does boost the ratio of country-factor variance relative to...

This paper finds strong evidence of predictability in Brady bonds, the most liquid emerging debt market, by implementing a new model for credit spreads. Predictability is economically and statistically significant and robust to various considerations. Active management provides US investors in...

This paper provides new evidence on the empirical success of structural models in explaining corporate credit risk changes. A parsimonious set of common factors and firm-level fundamentals, inspired by structural models, explains more than 54% (67%) of the variation in credit spread changes for...

In this paper, we examine returns in the Chinese A and B stock markets for evidence of calendar anomalies. We find that both cultural and structural (segmentation) factors play an important role in influencing the pricing of both A- and B-shares in China. There is some evidence of a February...

In the past few years there has been a large increase in portfolio capital flows into emerging markets, mostly fueled by mutual funds and other institutional investors. Based on a simple variance ratio test, this paper finds that emerging stock markets as a group experienced a sharp increase in...

This paper finds strong evidence of predictability in Brady bonds, the most liquid emerging debt market, by implementing a new model for credit spreads. Predictability is economically and statistically significant and robust to various considerations. Active management provides US investors in...

We study the investment behavior of foreign investors in association with an equity market liberalization, and find a strong link between foreigners' trading and local market returns. In the period following the liberalization, net purchases by foreign investors induced a permanent increase in...