This paper studies the business cycle effects on the performance of commercial bank loan portfolios across major developing economies in the period 1996-2008. We measure loan performance via loan loss provisions (that is, recognized expenses related to expected losses in bank income statements)....

Value investing is a common investment strategy, but like all other strategies it has suffered during certain periods, such as the tech rally in the late nineties. This paper examines the Value cycle globally, as well as specifically for Asia Pacific, and considers the impact of possible...

While Gorton and Rouwenhorst (2005) suggest using business cycle in tactical asset allocation with commodity futures, Jensen et al (2002) suggest using monetary policy in guiding the timing of investment. We investigate whether it is useful to watch both.We find that clever timing in asset...

We use a DSGE model that generates endogenous movements in risk premia to examine the positive and normative implications of alternative monetary policy rules. As emphasized by the micro-finance literature, variation in risk arises because households face fixed costs of transferring cash across...

This study attempts to find out whether investors reward firms that carry no debt and penalize firms that carry large amount of debt during recessions. I compare the performance of portfolios of large cap debt free firms to comparable portfolios of leveraged firms during the last recession. The...

This paper shows that the stylized fact of average mutual fund underperformance documented in the literature stems from expansion periods when funds have statistically significant negative risk-adjusted performance and not recession periods when risk-adjusted fund performance is positive. These...

Standard portfolio advice is that agents should hold a constant share of risky assets. All agents cannot, however, follow this advice because supply and demand of risky assets must be equal. To study equilibrium rebalancing, the paper develops an overlapping generations model in which agents...

Corporate credit spreads are large, volatile, countercyclical, and significantly larger than expected losses, but existing macroeconomic models with financial frictions fail to reproduce these patterns, because they imply small and constant aggregate risk premia. Building on the idea that...