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...

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;...