Accepted wisdom, assuming capital market equilibrium and low cash returns, advises investors to hold optimal portfolios containing little cash. But credit crunches - periods of non-price credit rationing when effective cash yields are very high - happen in the real world. Because of this, it is...

Student managed investment funds provide students the opportunity to manage a portfolio of real dollar investments and earn academic credit. Student managed funds typically benefit a University through improved course offerings within the field of finance where academic knowledge and practical...

We consider philanthropy by college alums from an innovative and provocative perspective: what if prospective college students were considered members of assets classes with different risk-return combinations? Using forty years of merged admissions-philanthropy records on students at a highly...

The government of Azerbaijan has expressed ambitious plans to ramp up the share of electricity generated from renewable and alternative energy. Currently, most electricity in Azerbaijan is produced from fossil fuels, including natural gas. Beyond being the source of almost all electricity...

Few papers provide research about options returns, and the few available are focused in the analysis from the perspective of the long side of the option contract, i.e. the buyer that pays the price and her expected and realized option return. The main point of our research work is to provide a...

Private equity and venture capital (PE/VC) funding is the provision of equity capital by financial investors to non-quoted companies with high growth potential. It has a particular emphasis on entrepreneurial activities rather than on mature businesses. PE/VC investors differ on several...

Based on the Partial Distribution (Feng Dai, 2001), a new model to price an asset (MPA) is given. Going a step further, this paper puts forward the Multivariate Partial Distribution (MPD) for the first time. By use of MPD, we could gain a new kind of model for pricing the group assets (MPGA), in...

Effective risk management is an important aspect of farming. Risk management involves choosing among alternatives that reduce the financial effects of the uncertainties of weather, yields, prices, government policies, and other factors that can cause wide swings in farm income. To deal with...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...

One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face is the sudden reversal of capital inflows. Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals, but these reserves are seldom sufficient and always expensive to hold. In...