Performance fees for portfolio managers are designed to align the managers' goals withthose of the investors and to motivate managers to aquire "superior" information and tomake better investment decisions. A part of the literature analyzes performance fees on thebasis of market valuation. In...

This paper argues that book-to-market and size attributes represent sensitivities of firm returns to several risk factors, and in so doing they subsume the information in other attributes.

The estimation of expected security returns is one of the major tasks for the practical implementationof the Markowitz portfolio optimization. Against this background, in 1992 Black and Littermandeveloped an approach based on (theoretically established) expected equilibrium returns whichaccounts...

In this paper the relation between aggregate mutual fund flows and stock market returns isanalysed with respect to three issues. First, we study the relation between fund flows andlong-term realized returns (past, current and future). Second, we find out that fund flows arenot driven by...

Using a new data set on investor sentiment we show that institutional and individualsentiment proxy for smart money and noise trader risk, respectively. First, usingbias-adjusted long-horizon regressions, we document that institutional sentiment forecastsstock market returns at intermediate...

The puzzling evidence of seemingly high momentum returns is related to an understanding ofrisk as a simple covariance. If we consider, however, risk in higher-order statistical moments,momentum returns appear less advantageous.

We find that price and earnings momentum are pervasive features of international equitymarkets when controlling for data snooping biases. For European countries, we find that pricemomentum is subsumed by earnings momentum on an aggregate level. However, this rationaledoes not apply to each and...

The most relevant practical impediment to an application of the Markowitz portfolio selectionapproach is the problem of estimating return moments, in particular return expectations. We analyzethe consequences of using return estimates implied by analysts’ dividend forecasts under the...

In the literature, implied rates of return are suggested as estimators for future expected oneperiodreturns because of their property not being prone to the discount rate effect. The discount rateeffect describes the problem that changes in expected future one-period returns lead to...

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...