Currently the real, inflation-adjusted, price of gold is almost as high as it was in January 1980 and August 2011. Since 1975, periods of high real gold prices have occurred during periods of elevated concern about high future price inflation. Five years after the real price peaks in January...

Over the 2016-2019 period, we released a series of research papers on the topic of “strategic risk management”, or the embedding of risk management into investment strategy design. We show that key risk controls that we introduced materially helped during the sharp equity market selloff in...

Common risk metrics reported in academia include volatility, skewness, and factor exposures. The maximum drawdown statistic is rarely calculated, perhaps because it is path dependent and estimated with greater uncertainty. In practice, however, asset managers and fiduciaries routinely use the...

In early 2002, we surveyed 384 financial executives, to determine the factors that drive dividend and share repurchase decisions. Our survey was supplemented by in-depth interviews with an additional 23 executives. The survey consisted of 11 main questions, most with subparts - over 100...

We analyze the results of the most recent survey of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) which looks ahead to the first quarter of 2006 and beyond. We present expectations of the equity risk premium measured over a 10-year horizon relative to a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond. This multi-year survey...

The unconditional mean-variance efficiency of the Morgan Stanley Capital International world equity index is investigated. Using data from 16 OECD countries and Hong Kong and maintaining the assumption of multivariate normality, we cannot reject the efficiency of the benchmark. However, residual...

This paper compares forecasts of real economic growth from models based on the stock market and bond market data. Although both contain information relevant for predicting GNP growth, the bond market delivers more accurate predictions. The bond market predictions are compared to the forecasts of...

We analyze the results of the September 2005 survey of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs). We present expectations of the equity risk premium measured over a 10-year horizon relative to a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond. This multi-year survey has been conducted every quarter from June 2000 to...

This paper examines a comprehensive list of 18 different risk factors that potentially impact international equity returns. These factors include systematic risk, idiosyncratic risk, size, semi-variance, downside betas, value-at-risk, skewness, coskewness, kurtosis, political risk and country...

A large body of academic research describes the optimal decisions that corporations should make, given certain assumptions and conditions. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that the way that corporations actually make decisions is not always consistent with the academic decision rules. In...