The covered bond market offers investors an alternative to developed country government securities. The valuation of covered bonds is complex. While there is some evidence of differences in the pricing of these bonds by nationality of issuer, these appear to be only weakly related to differences...

It is well established that international portfolios are far substantially under-diversified, contrary to predictions of traditional finance theory. Even after controlling for market segmentation and “investability” of foreign markets, portfolio under-diversification remains a puzzle. I...

This paper addresses the question of optimal currency exposure for a risk-and-ambiguity-avers international investor. A robust mean-variance model with smooth ambiguity preferences is used to derive the optimal currency exposure. In the theoretical part, we show that the sample-efficient...

This paper provides an overview of sovereign debt portfolio risks and discusses various liability management operations (LMOs) and instruments used by public debt managers to mitigate these risks. Debt management strategies analyzed in the context of helping reach debt portfolio targets and...

This paper aims to analyze so-called anomalies or additional risk factors (other than market risk) on the Hong Kong stock exchange. To do so, we first select arbitrarily several factors that we a priori believe to be significant, we then collect the data and evaluate the returns associated with...

In this paper, we aim at constructing a global risk model using the term structure from major bond-issuing countries. The goal is twofold: first this allows quantifying global interest rate risk (level, slope and curvature effects), providing insights on global risks at play. Secondly, such...

This article compares portfolio selection based on the downside risk sensitivity with portfolio selection based on Sharpe or Treynor ratios. Downside risk sensitivity (DRS) is given by an asset pricing model in which the downside and upside market returns are separated variables relative to...

We test the existence of a time-series relationship between the aggregate idiosyncratic volatility and the market index return at the global level by introducing various global measures of aggregate idiosyncratic volatility. We offer four definitions of aggregate global idiosyncratic volatility...

We develop a novel method to dynamically hedge foreign exchange exposure in international equity and bond portfolios. The method exploits the time-series predictability of currency returns, which we show emerges from exploiting a forecastable component in global factor returns. The hedging...

We test the role of funding-constrained investors across developed financial markets. We compile direct measures of the severity of funding frictions, or illiquidity, from deviations of government bond yields from a fitted yield curve. Using these illiquidity measures, we first show that higher...