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...

This paper explores the source(s) of commodity futures momentum and an associated anomaly. We decompose the 12-month conventional momentum strategy into single-month momentum components. Historical information in the cross-section of returns at 10 to 11 months prior to portfolio formation...

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 paper investigates the portfolio allocation effects of increased asset co-movements during extreme market downturns. We develop a model for the state variables underlying the stock price process that allows for increased and asymmetric dependence between extreme return realizations. We...

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...

We propose a practical investment framework for dynamic asset allocation across different economic regimes, which we illustrate using a sample of U.S. data from 1948 to 2007. We identify four regimes in the economic cycle and find that these regimes capture pronounced time-variation in the risk...

Many financial instruments are designed with embedded leverage such as options and leveraged exchange traded funds (ETFs). Embedded leverage alleviates investors' leverage constraints and, therefore, we hypothesize that embedded leverage lowers required returns. Consistent with this hypothesis,...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the behavior of international equity returns and correlations using the discrete-time Markov-switching model and the impact of this behavior on international portfolio choices. We take the perspective of a US-based global investor who considers investment...