We explore the pricing of variance risk by decomposing stocks' total variance into systematicand idiosyncratic return variances. While systematic variance risk exhibits a negative priceof risk, common shocks to the variances of idiosyncratic returns carry a large positive riskpremium. This...

We examine the impact of performance groups on the estimation of therelative importance of ¯rm, industry and other e®ects on corporate performance.Performance groups comprise ¯rms from the same industry with asimilar performance over a longer period of time. We present a statisticalmethod...

Die klassische, von Markowitz entwickelte, Portfoliotheorie basiert auf spezifischen Risikomaßen, der Renditevarianz bzw. der Renditestandardabweichung. Diese Risikomaße messen primär die Volatilität der Renditeentwicklung...

Applied researchers often test for the difference of the variance of two investment strategies;in particular, when the investment strategies under consideration aim to implementthe global minimum variance portfolio. A popular tool to this end is the F-test for theequality of variances....

It is well known that mean-variance portfolio selection is a time-inconsistent optimalcontrol problem in the sense that it does not satisfy Bellman’s optimalityprinciple and therefore the usual dynamic programming approach fails. We developa time-consistent formulation of this problem, which...

We derive an explicit formula of the Watts’ poverty index, in terms of parametersof bivariate lognormal distributions of price indices and nominal livingstandards. This result enables us to: analyse the contributions of the distributionsof prices and nominal living standards in poverty;...

This study explores the information content of HML and SMB by linking the Fama-French factors toshocks in the state variables which predict future investment opportunities. It shows that the HMLfactor contains information about shocks to default spread. Moreover, the Fama-French modelexplains...

This paper investigates model risk issues in the context of mean-variance portfolio selection. We analytically and numerically show that, under model misspecification, the use of statistically robust estimates instead of the widely used classical sample mean and covariance is highly beneficial...