This paper examines the strategies of Russian households for choosing either the formal or informal banking sector as a source of credit. We aim to learn why households refuse to become clients of a bank and prefer to instead raise funds by borrowing from individuals – friends, colleagues,...

Correctly estimating borrower credit risk is a task of particular and growing importance for banks all around the globe. Formal information sharing mechanisms are aimed to reduce information asymmetry in the credit markets and to enhance the precision of those estimates. In the literature,...

In the absence of transaction costs and the presence of independent returns, a buy-and-hold strategy can be shown to generate higher expected returns than a fixed-weight strategy, where the portfolio weights are regularly readjusted/rebalanced to some initial level. This higher expected return...

The Gram-Charlier expansion, where skewness and kurtosis directly appear as parameters, has become popular in Finance as a generalization of the normal density. We show how positivity constraints can be numerically implemented, thereby guaranteeing that the expansion defines a density. The...

It is well known that strategies that allow investors to allocate their wealth using return and volatility forecasts, the use of which are termed market and volatility timing, are of significant value. In this paper, we show that distribution timing, defined here as the ability to use forecasts...