What determines the risk structure of financial portfolios of German households? In this paper we estimate the determinants of the share of financial wealth invested in three broad risk classes. We employ a new econometric approach - the so called fractional multinomial logit model - which...

We build a parsimonious international asset pricing model in which deviations of government bond yields from a fitted yield curve of a country measure the tightness of investors' capital constraints. We compute these measures at daily frequency for six major markets and use them to test the...

Over the past 20 years, active fixed income (FI) managers have tended to deliver returns in excess of their benchmarks. This has generated a popular notion that active investing in fixed income markets is ‘easy'. Our aim is to assess the veracity of that notion. Across a broad set of popular...

We examine whether real-time return forecasts are valuable to an investor looking to allocate their portfolio across a wide selection of countries. We expand the Sum-of-Parts (SoP) method for forecasting stock returns to an international setup by adding FX returns as an additional component. We...

With the elimination of foreign exchange risk among the E.M.U.-member countries, the yield of, say, French benchmark government bonds (henceforth, the yield) should be equal to that of German bonds, plus some credit and liquidity premia. Since both premia are not likely to change substantially...

In this paper we examine changes on investment decisions induced by the introduction of the Euro. There are two potential sources of portfolio reallocation. First, the introduction of the Euro diminished exchange rate risks within the EMU region, which relieved European investors from currency...