We investigate the performance of 95 board members of listed Swiss companies over 12 years. We identify quantitatively measurable characteristics of board members and test for a relationship between board member characteristics and firm performance. As a proxy for firm performance, we use the...

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 factors are country-specific. This paper develops and...

The impact of the time horizon upon the risk of equity investments is still a controversial issue. In this paper, we analyse long-term risk in a portfolio insurance framework based on option pricing theory. The insurance strategies are implemented alternatively with a portfolio of stocks and put...

"We use Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for the parameter estimation and the testing of conditional asset pricing models. In contrast to traditional approaches, it is truly conditional because the assumption that time variation in betas is driven by a set of conditioning variables is not...

We use Bayesian model averaging to analyze industry return predictability in the presence of model uncertainty. The posterior analysis shows the importance of inflation and earnings yield in predicting industry returns. The out-of-sample performance of the Bayesian approach is, in general,...