"Arbitrage CDOs" have recorded an explosive growth during the years before the outbreak of the financial crisis. In the present paper we discuss potential sources of such arbitrage opportunities, in particular arbitrage gains due to mispricing. For this purpose we examine the risk profiles of...

This paper analyzes the expected life-time utility and the hedging demands in an exchange only, representative agent general equilibrium under incomplete information. We derive an expression for the investor's expected life-time utility, and analyze his hedging demands for intertemporal changes...

Passive investment strategies basically aim to replicate an underlying benchmark. Thereby, the management usually selects a subset of stocks being employed in the optimization procedure. Apart from the optimization procedure, the stock selection approach determines the stock portfolios's...

We derive new results on the asymptotic behavior of the estimated parameters of a linear asset pricing model and their associated t-statistics in the presence of a factor that is independent of the returns. The inclusion of this "useless" factor in the model leads to a violation of the full rank...

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...

Based on the theory of static replication of variance swaps we assess the sign and magnitude of variance risk premiums in foreign exchange markets. We find significantly negative risk premiums when realized variance is computed from intraday data with low frequency. As a likely consequence of...

Ambiguity aversion in dynamic models is motivated by the presence of unknown time-varying features, which agents do not understand and cannot theorize about. We analyze the consequences of this assumption for economic agents and model builders, who typically need to estimate a model, e.g., to...

This study uses a comprehensive data set of VIX and CDS markets to propose pairs trading strategies that represent the dynamic relation between market risk and credit risk in an equilibrium framework with a common non stationary factor. This involves the analysis of price discovery between VIX...

We find that weak identification can lead to econometric problems with Fama-MacBeth regressions, including serious size distortions and biased point estimates. Two sources of weak identification are particularly important and have been little studied in the finance literature – small betas and...

This paper adopts a copula approach at assessing the dependence structure of the U.S. equity market. Seven types of copulas are considered: Gaussian, Student t, Clayton, rotated Clayton, Gumbel, rotated Gumbel and BB4. By adopting a twenty-two year sample of daily returns on the seventeen Fama...