Human capital embodies the knowledge, skills, health and values that contribute to making people productive. These qualities, however, are hard to measure, and quantitative studies of human capital are typically based on the valuation of the lifetime income that a person generates in the labor...

In financial economics, numerous theoretical models explain the relationship between investment risk and return in the capital market, one of the most common being the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). After reviewing the literature in this area, this study discusses the theoretical background...

Coherent measures of risk defined by the axioms of monotonicity, subadditivity, positive homogeneity, and translation invariance are recent tools in risk management to assess the amount of risk agents are exposed to. If they also satisfy law invariance and comonotonic additivity, then we get a...

This paper applies the dichotomous theory of choice by Zou (2000a) tothe analysis of investmentstrategies and security markets. Issues concerning individualoptimality, (approximate) arbitrage,capital market equilibrium, and Pareto efficiency are studied undervarious market conditions. Among the...

This paper deals with the estimation of the risk-return trade-off. We use a MIDAS model for the conditional variance and allow for possible switches in the risk-return relation through a Markov-switching specification. We find strong evidence for regime changes in the risk-return relation. This...

This paper uses the method developed by Bollerslev and Todorov (2011b) to estimate risk premia for extreme events for the US and the German stock markets. The method extracts jump tail measures from high-frequency futures price data and from options data. In a second step, jump tail...

From 1963 through 2015, idiosyncratic risk (IR) is high when market risk (MR) is high. We show that the positive relation between IR and MR is highly stable through time and is robust across exchanges, firm size, liquidity, and market-to-book groupings. Though stock liquidity affects the...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensation for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. Although convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

We examine the roles of rational and behavioural factors in explaining long-run premiums/discounts on closed-end funds, using evidence on equity funds from the US and UK. Although the processes by which fund prices converge towards long-run premiums or discounts are similar in the two countries,...