We study a number of large international military conflicts sinceWorld War II where we establish a news analysis as a proxy for theestimated likelihood that the conflict will result in a war. We findthat in cases when there is a pre-war phase, an increase in the warlikelihood tends to decrease...

In this paper we develop the rst estimator of the covariance matrix that relies solely onforward-looking information. This estimator only uses price information from a cross-sectionof plain-vanilla options. In an out-of-sample study for US blue-chip stocks we show that aminimum-variance strategy...

The paper rst shows that nancial market equilibria need not to exist if agents possesscumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. This is due tothe boundary behavior of the cumulative prospect theory value function, which might causean innite short-selling...

Structured financial products have gained more and more popularity in recent years, but nevertheless has their success so far notthoroughly been analyzed. In this article we develop a theoreticalframework for the design of optimal structured products and analyzethe maximal utility gain for an...

The paper shows that financial market equilibria need not exist if agents possess cumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. The reason is an infiniteshort-selling problem. But even when a short-sell constraint is added, non-existence can occur due to...

We prove that under very weak conditions optimal financial products have to be co-monotone with the inverted state price density. Optimality is meant in the sense of the maximization of an arbitrary preference model, e.g. Expected Utility Theory or Prospect Theory. The proof is based on methods...

We study the influence of systematic probability misestimation on complexfinancial investment decisions on the context of structured financialproducts. Structured products have in recent years become more and morecomplex. We study the question whether this complexity might be a...

Expected returns can hardly be estimated from time series data. Therefore, many recent papers suggest investing in the global minimum variance portfolio. The weights of this portfolio are usually estimated by replacing the true return covariance matrix by its time series estimator. However,...

It seems to be widely accepted that Jensen alpha fails to detect successful market timing funds spuriously indicating poor fund performance. Jensen (1972), Admati and Ross (1985), Dybvig and Ross (1985), and Grinblatt and Titman (1989), (1995) attribute that to an upwards biased estimate of the...

Nach §44 Investmentgesetz (InvG) sind Investmentfonds verpflichtet, im Rahmen ihres regelmäßigen Berichtswesens den Anlegern zumindest halbjährlich ihre Portfoliozusammensetzung bekannt zu geben. Häufigere oder auch detailliertere Portfolioveröffentlichung erhöht die Trans parenz des...