WThis doctoral thesis focuses on the effects of investor sentiment on asset pricing and the challenges of portfolio optimization under parameter uncertainty. The first essay "Sentiment risk premia in the cross-section of global equity" applies a recently developed sentiment proxy to the...

We assess the impact of media sentiment on international equity prices using more than 4.5 million Reuters articles published across the globe between 1991 and 2015. News sentiment robustly predicts daily returns in both advanced and emerging markets, even after controlling for known...

We document a curious feature of the German mutual fund industry. Unlike U.S. mutual funds, funds domiciled in Germany do not necessarily compute their net asset values (NAV) as of market close. Using a sample of German equity funds, we infer each fund's NAV closing time from the best-fit market...

Standard factor pricing models do not capture well the common time-series or cross-sectional variation in average returns of financial stocks. We propose a five-factor asset pricing model that complements the standard Fama and French (1993) three-factor model with a financial sector ROE factor...

Recent developments in the U.S. corporate bond market, as well as recent evidence on the pricing of illiquidity in this market, prompt us to reexamine the pricing of new bonds. The pricing of new investment-grade bonds appears to reflect both initial underpricing and higher liquidity: New bonds...

Certain corporate transactions (eg. insider purchases and buyback announcements) are known to be robust predictors of firm-level returns. However, I empirically show equity analysts largely ignore such informative, yet subtle, signals of stocks they cover. A trading strategy that follows...

The one-side defaultable financial derivatives valuation problems have been studied extensively, but the valuation of bilateral derivatives with asymmetric credit qualities is still lacking convincing mechanism. This paper presents an analytical model for valuing derivatives subject to default...