During the last decade, derivatives markets became an asset class of their own and influenced the financial landscape strongly. While the financial sector contributes positively to overall economic growth in many studies up to the mid nineties, a positive contribution of the financial sector to...

The 27th SUERF Colloquium in Munich in June 2008: New Trends in Asset Management: Exploring the Implications was already topical in the Summer of 2008. The subsequent dramatic events in the Autumn of 2008 made the presentations in Munich even more relevant to investors and bankers that want to...

Although mutual fund performance has been dissected from almost every angle, very little attention has been paid to the connection between the actual active decisions made by management and the subsequent performance outcomes. In this paper we use information on institutional mutual funds to...

Since Shalit and Yitzhalit (1984) the Mean-Extended Gini (MEG) has been proposed as a workable alternative to the classical Markowitz mean-variance CAPM. Although MEG keeps under control the risk belonging to the left-tail of the return distribution, small attention is reserved to potential...

Empirical evidence indicates that trades by institutional investors have sizable effects on asset prices, generating phenomena such as index effects, asset-class effects and others. It is difficult to explain such phenomena within standard representative-agent asset pricing models. In this...

We model and test the relations between the team management of mutual funds, fund manager ability, fund performance, and holdings. Our model predicts that team-managed funds will perform better, allocate their funds more conservatively, and trade less aggressively than single-manager funds....

The top 5 percent of actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds in 2012 had greater aggregate TNA than the remaining 95 percent of funds combined. This skewness in size has implications for mutual fund research: What is true of the average fund is not necessarily true of the average dollar. We...

This paper formally analyzes the biases related to self-reporting in hedge fund databases by matching the quarterly equity holdings of a complete list of 13F-filing hedge fund companies to the union of five major commercial databases of self-reporting hedge funds between 1980 and 2008. We find...

We consider the problem of finding a strategy that tracks the volume weighted average price (VWAP) of a stock, a key measure of execution quality for large orders used by institutional investors. We obtain the optimal, dynamic, VWAP tracking strategy in closed form in a model with general price...

This paper investigates the impact of using different risk-adjusted measures of performance on the evaluation of UK investment trusts. Significant negative skewness is probably the most important empirical property of the time series of returns under analysis. Performance results based on the...