In this paper we document that at the aggregate stock market level the unexpected volatility is negatively related to expected future returns and positively related to future volatility. We demonstrate how the predictive ability of unexpected volatility can be utilized in dynamic asset...

For US investors, international equity exposure has never been so readily available at such a low cost. Nonetheless, surveys indicate US investors typically allocate 80–85% of their equity holdings to US equities, much higher than their proportion of global market value. In this note we...

Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

This paper proposes a novel approach to the combination of conditional covariance matrix forecasts based on the use of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). It is shown how the procedure can be generalized to deal with large dimensional systems by means of a two-step strategy. The finite...

Under the Basel II Accord, banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) have to communicate their daily risk estimates to the monetary authorities at the beginning of the trading day, using a variety of Value-at-Risk (VaR) models to measure risk. Sometimes the risk estimates...

This paper uses fractional cointegration analysis to examine whether long-run relations exist between securitized real estate returns and three sets of variables frequently used in the literature as the factors driving securitized real estate returns. That is, we examine whether such...

As part of managing a debt portfolio, debt managers face the challenging task of choosing a strategy that minimizes the cost of debt, subject to limitations on risk. The Bank of Canada provides debt-management analysis and advice to the Government of Canada to assist in this task, with the...

The use of mixture distributions for modeling asset returns has a long history in finance. New methods of demonstrating support for the presence of mixtures in the multivariate case are provided. The use of a two-component multivariate normal mixture distribution, coupled with shrinkage via a...

This paper puts forward an alternative approach to multiplicative models and their assessment of returns out of financial assets. Firstly, it lays down an operative definition but also sets forth a commutative framework of mappings to provide foundations to such a definition. Next, the total...

The classical APT model is of the form r j - E(r j) = beta j(I - EI) + epsilon j, where r j - E(r j) is the earning deviation (called basic ariance-profit) of the security j, I is a common factor. This paper considers the impact on the securities return caused by the skewness and kurtosis of the...