Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the unpriced risk of individual securities. In this article we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case of fat-tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a...

Actual portfolios contain fewer stocks than are implied by standard financial analysis that balances the costs of diversification against the benefits in terms of the standard deviation of the returns. Suppose a safety first investor cares about downside risk and recognizes the heavytail feature...

Are capital controls and macroprudential measures successful in achieving their objectives? Assessing their effectiveness is complicated by selection bias and endogeneity; countries which change their capital-flow management measures (CFMs) often share specific characteristics and are responding...

We use changes in Brazil’s tax on capital inflows from 2006 to 2011 to test for direct portfolio effects and externalities from capital controls on investor portfolios. The analysis is structured based on information from investor interviews. We find that an increase in Brazil’s tax on...

This paper attempts to borrow the tradition of estimating policy reaction functions in monetary policy literature and apply it to capital controls policy literature. Using a novel weekly dataset on capital controls policy actions in 21 emerging economies over the period 1 January 2001 to 31...

A seminal paper by Fama and Bliss (1987) showed that a simple regression model could explain a significant portion of 1-year ahead excess returns. Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) showed that their regression model could explain a significantly larger por tion of excess returns than Fama and...

The 4 th European Retail Investment Conference was hosted at Boerse Stuttgart, Germany, from May 17 th to 19 th 2017. The conference chairs invited academics and practitioners to participate and discuss empirical and theoretical research that investigates retail investor products and services,...

A credit default swap (CDS) is a financial contract in which the holder of the instrument will be compensated in the event of a loan default. When available, CDS's are used to monitor the credit risk of countries and companies. In this work we develop a closed form procedure to value a CDS in...

The main aim of this work is to price defaultable bonds. In order to achieve this goal we link first hitting densities of Brownian motion with functionals of controlled diffusions. From a practical point of view examples of diffusions with this property are: Brownian motion with linear drift,...

Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...