Over the last two decades, commodity indices have been increasingly used to achieve investment portfolio diversification. At the same time, the rise in the popularity of these indices has prompted questions on whether commodities remained segmented from traditional financial asset markets, which...

The optimal portfolio of a utility-maximizing investor trading in the S&P 500 index and cash, subject to proportional transaction costs, becomes stochastically dominated when overlaid with a zero-net-cost portfolio of S&P 500 options bought at their ask and written at their bid price in most...

Since portfolio management relies on the association of portfolio diversification, analyzing the spillover between the United States (US) and Asian-Pacific financial markets has become more critical. If Asian stock markets have low or negative correlations with each other and/or the US market,...

We provide simple examples to illustrate how wealth-driven selection works in asset markets. Our examples deliver both good and bad news. The good news is that if individual assets demands are expressed as a fractions of wealth to be invested in each asset, e.g. because traders maximize an...

This paper studies the effect of new fund flows on investment behavior and the resulting equilibrium price of risk. The Small Fund Industry model shows equilibria with overinvestment in unprofitable and underinvestment in profitable investment opportunities. The Large Fund Industry model derives...

The portfolio of the average investor contains important information for strategic asset allocation purposes. This portfolio shows the relative value of all assets according to the market crowd, which one could interpret as a benchmark or the optimal portfolio for the average investor. We...

Investing in financial securities inevitably involves risks on the one hand and opportunities on the other hand. This thesis bundles four different studies on risks and/or opportunities in financial markets. In one study, we examine the cross-sectional explanatory power of different...

This paper derives an equilibrium asset pricing model with liquidity risk. Liquidity risk is modeled as a stochastic quantity impact on the price from trading, where the size of the impact depends on trade size. Under a mild set of assumptions, we prove that an equilibrium price process exists...

We consider a model where investors can invest directly or search for an asset manager, information about assets is costly, and managers charge an endogenous fee. The efficiency of asset prices is linked to the efficiency of the asset management market: if investors can find managers more...