Present market instabilities have prompted great interest on the characteristics of specific portfolios such as minimum variance and equally- weighted risk contribution portfolios as these portfolios do not rely on the estimate of expected returns. Indeed, in turmoil periods traditional market...

When an event is anticipated, the firm's stock return around the announcement of the event may have an inconsistent sign: a positive sign around negative news, or vice versa. We attempt to quantify the frequency of this problem, first with a brief mathematical model and simulation, then with...

Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

In this paper, we provide evidence on two alternative mechanisms of interaction between returns and volatilities: the leverage effect and the volatility feedback effect. We stress the importance of distinguishing between realized volatility and implied volatility, and find that implied...

This paper offers an improvement to the trade-to-trade model for event studies. While the trade-to-trade model of Maynes and Rumsey (1993) addresses the problem of thin trading by eliminating periods in which no trading is recorded, the proposed improvement addresses the influence of zero-value...

A daily log-return can be regarded as a test statistic - specifically the (unscaled) sample mean of a sequence of intraday random variables. We discuss sufficient conditions for a dependent bootstrap to consistently and non-parametrically estimate the entire distribution of this “test...

Using equations that arise in quantum mechanics, this paper describes a way to more accurately and efficiently represent non-Gaussian return distributions than the standard method of invoking skewness and kurtosis. Then, it provides a new single intuitive number, defined here as the “crash...

This paper presents a forward looking model for selection of hedge fund investment strategies. Given excess skewness observed in hedge funds' return distributions, we assume that the historical returns have a skew student t distribution. We implement a Bayesian framework to derive the parameters...

An international portfolio allows simultaneous investment in both domestic and foreign markets. It hence has the potential for improved performance by exploiting a wider range of returns, and diversification benefits, than portfolios investing in a single country. However, to obtain the most...

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...