Let e and S be respectively the vector of shocks and its variance covariance matrix in a linear system of equations in reduced form. This article shows that a unique orthogonal variance decomposition can be obtained if we impose a restriction that maximizes the trace of A, a positive definite...

This article extends the variance ratio test of Lo and MacKinlay (1988) to tests of skewness and kurtosis ratios. The proposed tests are based on generalized methods of moments. In particular, overlapping observations are used and their dependencies (under the IID assumption) are explicitly...

CA representative pensioner is considered for the evaluation of some of the cost factors for the career-average-revalued-earnings (CARE) defined benefit scheme of USS (the Universities Superannuation Scheme). Since the promised benefit increases with inflation, the return on the pension...

Contrary to public perception, this article finds Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), the largest defined benefit pension in UK, is more likely to be in surplus rather than deficit. Evidence is provided to show that neither low gilt yields nor high valuations imply low future returns on...

Dufour and Engle (J. Finance (2000) 2467) find evidence of an increased presence of informed traders when the NYSE markets are most active. No such evidence, however, can be found by Manganelli (J. Financial Markets (2005) 377) for the infrequently traded stocks. In this paper, we fit a...

The current subprime crisis has prompted us to look again into the nature of risk at the tail of the distribution. In particular, we investigate the risk contribution of an asset, which has infrequent but huge losses, to a portfolio using two risk measures, namely Value-at-Risk (VaR) and...

We analyse the well-known TORQ dataset of trades on the NYSE over a 3-month period, breaking down transactions depending on whether the active or passive side was institutional or private. This allows us to compare the returns on the different trade categories. We find that, however we analyse...