Professional forecasters of economic data are remunerated based on accuracy and positive publicity generated for their firms. This remuneration structure incentivizes them to stick to the consensus but also to make bold forecasts when they perceive to have private information. We find that bold...

Professional forecasters of economic data are remunerated based on accuracy and positive publicity generated for their firms. This remuneration structure incentivizes them to stick to the median forecast but also to make bold forecasts when they perceive to have superior private information. We...

Low probability events are overweighted in the pricing of out-of-the-money index puts and single stock calls. We show that such a behavioral bias is strongly time-varying and is linked to equity market sentiment and higher moments of the risk-neutral density. We find that our implied volatility...

Standard risk metrics tend to underestimate the true risks of hedge funds because of serial correlation in the reported returns. Getmansky et al. (2004) derive mean, variance, Sharpe ratio, and beta formulae adjusted for serial correlation. Following their lead, adjusted downside and global...

Standard risk metrics tend to underestimate the true risks of hedge funds because of serial correlation in the reported returns. Getmansky, Lo, and Makarov (2004) derive mean, variance, Sharpe ratio, and beta formulae adjusted for serial correlation. Following their lead, we derive adjusted...

The global financial crisis that started in mid-2007 illustrates the relevance of systemic risk. One key driver of the systemic instability that materialized in the crisis was the elevated level of stress in large banks. We use EVT to analyse the effect of size on banks' univariate and systemic...

We show that simple technical trading rule (TTR) strategies substantially reduce investment left tail risk. An investor following a TTR strategy can also avoid a high percentage of extremely negative returns. This percentage increases substantially during recessions. Interestingly, tail risk...