The rapid growth of the use of options in portfolio management has been accompanied by a variety of claims regarding the performance of options strategies. In particular, many investors believe that they can enhance the performance of their pure-stock portfolios using systematic covered-call...

We study a test statistic on the integrated squared difference between a kernel estimator of the copula density and a kernel smoothed estimator of the parametric copula density. We show for fixed smoothing parameters that the test is consistent and that the asymptotic properties are driven by a...

This paper proposes a Kolmogorov-type test for the shortfall order (also known in the literature as the right-spread or excess-wealth order) against parametric alternatives. In the case of the null hypothesis corresponding to the Negative Exponential distribution, this provides a test for the...

Municipal bonds trade in opaque, decentralized broker-dealer markets in which price information is costly to gather. Whether dealers in such a market operate competitively is an empirical issue, but a difficult one to study. Data in such markets is generally not centrally recorded. We analyze a...

Equity returns are believed to be strongly influenced by country, sector and style effects. A key issue is to be able to disentangle those various effects from one another. In particular, differences between country returns may simply reflect differences in the sector composition of country...

This paper investigates theoretically and empirically the dynamics of the implied volatility (or implied standard deviation - ISD) around earnings announcements dates. The volatility implied by option prices can be interpreted as the level of volatility expected by the market over the remaining...

This paper compares the impacts of alternative models of spatial dependence on the accuracy of house price predictions in a mass appraisal context. Explicit modeling of spatial dependence is characterized as a more fluid approach to defining housing submarkets. This approach allows the relevant...

We examine the long-run performance of firms that offer seasoned equity on the Swiss market. Swiss firms use offerings with rights to raise new equity and they can issue three types of securities. Moreover, the tax law has for some firms the effect of increasing the issuing frequency. We find...

The impact of views on property values has not been the specific focus of as much research as has the impact of other externalities on property values. When the impact of views is assessed, it is usually done by adding a single dummy variable to a hedonic regression equation. This paper provides...

This paper examines the impact of real time uncertainty on the performance of international mean-variance conditional asset allocation. This notion can be defined as the uncertainty faced by an investor regarding specification choices necessary to implement a conditional strategy. To assess the...