Many sophisticated investors rely on scenario analysis to select a portfolio. These investors define prospective economic scenarios, assign probabilities to them, translate the scenarios into expected asset class returns, and select the portfolio with the highest expected return or expected...

Financial analysts assume that the reliability of predictions derived from regression analysis improves with sample size. This is generally true because larger samples tend to produce less noisy results than smaller samples. But this is not always the case. Some observations are more relevant...

The authors introduce a new index of the business cycle that uses the Mahalanobis distance to measure the statistical similarity of current economic conditions to past episodes of recession and robust growth. Their index has several important features that distinguish it from the Conference...

Investors have traditionally relied on mean-variance analysis to determine a portfolio’s optimal asset mix, but they have struggled to incorporate private equity into this framework because they do not know how to estimate its risk. The observed volatility of private equity returns is...

Investors rely on the stock-bond correlation for a variety of tasks, such as forming optimal portfolios, designing hedging strategies, and assessing risk. Most investors estimate the stock-bond correlation simply by extrapolating the historical correlation of monthly returns and assume that this...

The authors introduce a new methodology for determining the relative importance of fiscal and monetary policy to promote growth and stabilize inflation. They apply this methodology to a panel of data that spans 66 years and 17 countries. Their analysis shows that, on average, monetary policy is...