We investigate the dynamics of the relationship between returns and extreme downside risk in different states of the market by combining the framework of Bali, Demirtas, and Levy (2009) with a Markov switching mechanism. We show that the risk-return relationship identified by Bali, Demirtas, and...

In today’s interrelated economies, financial information travel at speed of light to reach investors around the globe. Global financial markets experience regular shocks that transmit negative waves to other equity markets and different asset classes. Given the unique characteristics of...

A closet indexer is more likely to meet a value-weighted investment benchmark by value-weighting the portfolio. Following this intuition, we introduce a simple measure of active management, the absolute difference between the value weights and the actual weights held by a fund, averaged across...

We examine whether professional money managers overreact to large climatic disasters. We find that managers within a major disaster region underweight disaster zone stocks to a much greater degree than distant managers and that this aversion to disaster zone stocks is related to a salience bias...

We propose a new investment strategy employing “factor funds” to systematically enhance the mean-variance efficiency of international diversification. Our approach is motivated by the increasing evidence that size (SMB), book-to-market (HML), and momentum (MOM) factors, along with the market...

Funds of hedge funds are diversified investment vehicles that provide investors with diversification either across managers within a specific hedge fund strategy or across a wide range of hedge fund strategies. In this paper, we contrast the performance of funds of hedge funds that diversify...

This paper compares returns of ETFs holding physical commodities and ETFs holding derivative products to their respective spot commodity returns to identify significant performance differences based on the ETF assets. We regress ETF returns on spot commodity returns to estimate beta and R2...

We pursue the first large scale investigation of a strongly growing mutual fund type: Islamic funds. Based on an unexplored, survivorship bias adjusted dataset, we analyse the financial performance and investment style of 265 Islamic equity funds from twenty countries. As Islamic funds often...

We develop a directional trading model and a crisis management model to measure fund manager skills more adequately. We test the robustness of both traditional market timing models and new management skill models to changes in their underlying investor utility function and excess return...