Latvian employees have to choose a pension fund for the second-pillar of the Latvian pension system. These pension funds invest about 85% in domestic assets. In this paper, we address the question why this strong home bias might exist. Firstly, we conclude that the Latvian pension law is strict...

The driving force behind the well-documented medium term momentum effect in stock returns is subject of much debate. Empirical papers that aim to find the determinants of this return continuation, seem to be almost exclusively restricted to US stock markets. Consequently, regional effects have...

We decompose the conditional expected mutual fund return in five parts. Two parts, selectivity and expert market timing, can be attributed to manager skill, and three to variation in market exposure that can be achieved by private investors as well. The dynamic model that we use to estimate the...

We measure the economic value of information derived from macroeconomic variables and from technical trading rules for emerging markets currency investments. Our analysis is based on a sample of 21 emerging markets with a floating exchange rate regime over the period 1997-2007 and explicitly...

This paper examines the ability of balanced pension plan managers to successfully time the equity and bond market and select the appropriate assets within these markets. In order to evaluate both market timing abilities in these balanced pension plans, we extend the traditional equity market...

We investigate the construction of well-diversified high-conviction equity portfolios, building on Rudin and Morgan (2006) who introduced the Portfolio Diversification Index (PDI) as a new measure of portfolio diversification applied to long/short equity hedge funds in an in-sample period. We...

We decompose the conditional expected mutual fund return in ve parts.Two parts, selectivity and expert market timing, can be attributed to manager skill, and three to variation in market exposure that can be achieved by private investors as well.The dynamic model that we use to estimate the...