This paper examines the effect that biofuels production has had on commodity and global food prices. The innovative contribution of this paper is the interactive spreadsheet that allows the reader to choose the assumptions behind the estimates. By allowing the reader to choose the country, time...

Standard risk management approaches fail to consider parameter uncertainty, which has led to improper risk management. Blind faith in parameter estimates has too often led to blind faith in the resulting VAR outputs, and when these estimates are too often exceeded the proposed solution is...

Managing risk successfully requires a detailed understanding of the distributions from which random shocks to asset prices are drawn. However, there is uncertainty in both the actual distribution of returns and the parameters characterizing the distribution. In this chapter, we focus on the...

We use a holdings-based attribution model to disaggregate the benchmark-adjusted returns to U.S. equity mutual funds into components that reflect persistent segment tilts, the timing of segment returns, and stock selection relative to their benchmarks. We find that large-cap funds add value by...

In our paper — “How Can ‘Smart Beta' Go Horribly Wrong?” — we show, using U.S. data, that the relative valuation of a strategy (in comparison with its own historical norms) is correlated with the strategy's subsequent return at a five-year horizon. The high past performance of many of...

The main result of this paper is that, in continuous time games with imperfect monitoring it is better to average information over time rather than respond at every instant. The two main reasons why it is better to introduce delayed response to signals are that it helps to (1) loosen...

This article uses the Expectations Hypothesis (EH), one of the oldest theories in finance, to extract the information contained in the term structure of commodity futures prices. Under the powerful framework provided by the EH, we find a significant amount of predictability in commodity futures...