Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

In this article we examine the risk factors that help explain long/short equity (LSE) mutual fund performance. We show that for most LSE mutual funds, 50%-80% of their returns can be explained using common factors such as capitalization, book-to-value ratio, dividend yield, and volatility. The...

We develop a methodology for estimating and testing the effect of anomalies in conditional asset pricing models when premia are time-varying. Our method, which builds on the two-pass methodology, is developed for ordinary and weighted least-squares estimation, considering both cases of correct...

We propose a jump robust positive semidefinite rank-based estimator for the daily covariance matrix based on high-frequency intraday returns. It disentangles covariance estimation into variance and correlation components. This allows to estimate correlations over lower sampling frequencies, to...

We estimate the daily integrated variance and covariance of stock returns using high-frequency data in the presence of jumps, market microstructure noise and non-synchronous trading. For this we propose jump robust two time scale (co)variance estimators and verify their reduced bias and mean...

We implement a long-horizon static and dynamic portfolio allocation involving a risk-free and a risky asset. This model is calibrated at a quarterly frequency for ten European countries. We also use maximum-likelihood estimates and Bayesian estimates to account for parameter uncertainty. We find...

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...

Oil is perceived as a good diversification tool for stock markets. To fully understand this potential, we propose a new empirical methodology that combines generalized autoregressive score copula functions with high frequency data and allows us to capture and forecast the conditional...

We develop a new methodology that measures conditional dependency. We achieve this by using copula functions that link marginal distributions, here chosen to obey a GARCH-type model with time-varying skewness and kurtosis. We apply this model to daily returns of stock-market indices. We find...

This study has 4 contributions to the literature. First, the authors analyze the risk characteristics for 11 Relative Value hedge fund strategies. Second, the authors introduce 3 families of behavioral factors, the D family, the L family, and the R family. In contrast to previous hedge fund...