Applied researchers often test for the difference of the variance of two investment strategies;in particular, when the investment strategies under consideration aim to implementthe global minimum variance portfolio. A popular tool to this end is the F-test for theequality of variances....

Applied researchers often test for the difference of the variance of two investment strategies; in particular, when the investment strategies under consideration aim to implement the global minimum variance portfolio. A popular tool to this end is the F-test for the equality of variances....

Applied researchers often want to make inference for the difference of a given performance measure for two investment strategies. In this paper, we consider the class of performance measures that are smooth functions of population means of the underlying returns; this class is very rich and...

This paper analyzes whether standard covariance matrix tests work when dimensionality is large, and in particular larger than sample size. In the latter case, the singularity of the sample covariance matrix makes likelihood ratio tests degenerate, but other tests based on quadratic forms of...

Many postulated relations in finance imply that expected asset returns strictly increase in an underlying characteristic. To examine the validity of such a claim, one needs to take the entire range of the characteristic into account, as is done in the recent proposal of Patton and Timmermann...

Many postulated relations in finance imply that expected asset returns should monotonically increase in a certain characteristic. To examine the validity of such a claim, one typically considers a finite number of return categories, ordered according to the underlying characteristic. A standard...