Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

Frazzini and Pedersen (2014) document that a betting against beta strategy that takes long positions in low-beta stocks and short positions in high-beta stocks generates a large abnormal return of 6.6% per year and they attribute this phenomenon to funding liquidity risk. We demonstrate that...

The aim of the paper is to develop a technique for rebalancing pension fund portfolios in function of their point wise level of risk. The performance of pension funds is often measured by their global asset returns because of the latter's influence on periodic contributions and/or future...

The position of countries in a network of external portfolio investments provides a novel macroeconomic characteristic to explain violations of uncovered interest rate parity. I derive a network centrality measure, where central countries are highly integrated with key suppliers of tradeable...

This paper provides global evidence supporting the hypothesis that expected return models are enhanced by the inclusion of variables that describe the evolution of book-to-market-changes in book value, changes in price, and net share issues. This conclusion is supported using data representing...

Buying profitable, undervalued stocks and shorting unprofitable, overvalued stocks yields significant return differentials in North America, Europe, Japan, and Asia. Using data from 1991-2016, we test Greenblatt's (2006) “Magic Formula” (MF) and find that a modified MF which uses gross...

Mechanisms to develop divestment strategies are an essential component of carbon reduction strategies. The rate at which investors should divest has become a critical aspect of effective divestment, which has shifted from the periphery to a movement of over a thousand major investors, totaling...

Investing in financial securities inevitably involves risks on the one hand and opportunities on the other hand. This thesis bundles four different studies on risks and/or opportunities in financial markets. In one study, we examine the cross-sectional explanatory power of different...

We find that global time series carry strategies (across bonds, commodities, currencies, equities and metals) can be explained by a set of lagged macroeconomic variables. The payoffs to carry strategies disappear once futures returns are adjusted for their predictability based on these...