The most widely used tool to measure, gear and control market risk is value-at-risk (VaR).VaR quantifies the worst loss over a specified target horizon with a given statisticalconfidence level. In other words, it represents a quantile of an estimated profit-lossdistribution. Various...

This article finds strong evidence for the presence of the disposition effect among US mutual fund managers. The analysis can establish a link between the disposition effect and mutual fund characteristics as well as changes in the macroeconomic environment. Managers with a lower disposition...

In this paper, we construct the three-factor model introduced by Chen et al. (2010) for a European sample covering 10 countries from the European Monetary Union and the period from 1990 to 2006. Two key findings result. First, we show that the properties of the European factors are comparable to...

This study investigates the relationship between governance, investment performance and asset allocation of pension funds in Switzerland. Our sample includes survey data from 139 Swiss occupational pension plans for which we develop a governance metric comprising attributes of organisational...

This paper investigates the role of incomplete investor information in financial innovations. By analyzing the information that structured product issuers provide to the investors of those products, we find that issuers have an information advantage over investors regarding two important...

This paper studies variance risk premiums in the credit market. Using a novel data set of swaptions quotes on the CDX North America Investment Grade index, we find that returns of credit variance swaps are negative and economically large. Shorting credit variance swaps yields an annualized...

This paper investigates the announcement effects of contingent convertible securities (CoCo bonds) issued by global banks between January 2009 and June 2014. Using a sample of 34 financial institutions and 87 CoCo bond issues, we examine abnormal stock price reactions and CDS spread changes...

We show that the introduction of a leverage constraint improves the practical implementation of characteristics-based portfolios. The addition of the constraint leads to significantly lower transaction costs, to a reduction of negative portfolio weights, and to a decrease in volatility and...

The four risk factors controlling for the market, size, value, and momentum effect have become a state-of-the-art framework for various applications in financial markets research. However, previous work shows that these broadly recognized risk factors are country-specific. For these reasons,...