One of the enduring principles of federal securities regulation is the mantra that bonds are securities, while commercial loans are not. Yet the corporate bond and loan markets in the U.S. are rapidly converging, putting significant pressure on the disparity in their regulatory treatment. As...

The Thomson VentureXpert database has been used for over two decades by practitioners and academics to benchmark and judge the performance of private equity and venture capital. A closer look at aggregated and individual figures, however, reveals severe anomalies in the underlying data which are...

The hedge fund industry represents a significant and viable alternative for mainstream investment business clientèle, as well as a growing number of sophisticated high net worth individuals. The hedge fund raison d'être has been relative independence of other (more traditional) asset classes...

This paper shows that analyst recommendations aggregated at the country level predict international stock market returns. A trading strategy based on past country-level recommendations yields an abnormal return of around 0.9 percent per month. Aggregate analyst recommendations also predict...

The idea behind the optimal ESG portfolio (OESGP) is to expand the mean variance theory by adding the portfolio ESG value (PESGV) multiplied by the ESG strength parameter γ (which is investor’s choice) to the minimizing objective function (Pederson et al., 2019; Schmidt, 2020). PESGV is assumed...

We first develop a theory-based metric to judge the popularity of value-weighting in a stock market. We then use our metric to document that although value-weighting is less popular in emerging markets than in developed markets, its popularity is increasing almost everywhere. Finally, as we have...

On November 14th, 2014, SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum – and CNMV, Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores – the Spanish Authority for supervision of securities markets – jointly organized a conference in Madrid: Challenges in Securities Markets Regulation: Investor...

We show that aggregate insider trading (AIT) in the S&P 500 is a reliable predictor of the U.S. equity premium, while AIT outside the S&P 500 seems to be uninformative. Aggregate trading of S&P 500 insiders outperforms a broad set of well-established predictors considering in- and out-of-sample...