This paper uses stamp catalogue prices to investigate the returns on British collectible postage stamps over the period 1900–2008. We find an annualized return on stamps of 7.0% in nominal terms, or 2.9% in real terms. These returns are higher than those on bonds but below those on equities....

Analysts quantify price uncertainty through their estimates. This study utilizes the art market as an exogenous setting to explore how an increase in price uncertainty (e.g., the death of an artist) impacts the accuracy and precision of analysts' estimates. We find that in the year following an...

This paper analyzes the effect of the recent market crash on the international diversification of equity portfolios from the perspective of dependence structure. We use the generalized Pareto distribution to fit the left and the right tail of each return distribution in order to evaluate the...

The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) for a security is a linear relationship between the expected excess return of the security and the expected excess return of the market. It was developed by William Sharpe, John Lintner and Jan Mossin. It is a useful framework to discuss idiosyncratic and...

Pre-averaging is a popular strategy for mitigating microstructure in high frequency financial data. As the term suggests, transaction or quote data are averaged over short time periods ranging from 30 seconds to five minutes, and the resulting averages approximate the efficient price process...

The VIX index is not only a volatility index but also a polynomial combination of all possible higher moments in market return distribution under the risk-neutral measure. This paper formulates the VIX as a linear decomposition of four fundamentally different elements: the realized variance...

We find that the demand for stock options that increases exposure to the underlying is positively related to the individual investor sentiments and past market returns, whereas the demand for index options is invariant to these factors. These differences in trading patterns are also reflected in...

We use a parametric portfolio approach to estimate optimal commercial real estate portfolio policies. We do so using the NCREIF data set of commercial properties over the sample period 1984:Q2 to 2009:Q1. The richness of this extensive data set and the flexibility of the parametric portfolio...

We use a quantile-based measure of conditional skewness (or asymmetry) that is robust to outliers and therefore particularly suited for recalcitrant series such as emerging market returns. Our study is on the following portfolio returns: developed markets, emerging markets, the world, and...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the holiday effect in Thailand. The holiday effect is the phenomenon in which the stock returns are abnormally high before holidays. There is no complete explanation for this phenomenon though there are many studies that state that the holiday effect has...