Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

The main goal of this paper is to better understand the behavior of credit spreads in the past and the potential risk of unexpected future credit spread changes. One important consideration to note regarding credit spreads is the fact that bond spreads contain a liquidity premium, which...

The article investigates the use of adaptive learning algorithms in constructing dynamic portfolios replicating the return characteristics of a given hedge fund. The emphasis is on out of sample conditional predictive capabilites as necessary to serve as a valuable risk management tool, rather...

We discuss the finding that cross-sectional characteristic based models have yielded portfolios with higher excess monthly returns but lower risk than their arbitrage pricing theory counterparts in an analysis of equity returns of stocks listed on the JSE. Under the assumption of general...

Econometrics is the area of statistics concerned in analyzing economic data, for both economic and business applications. This document, introduces the intermediate concepts of this area, for students already familiarized with basic econometric theory. In particular, topics concerning...

Campbell and Shiller average 10 years of real S&P 500 earnings to construct its Cyclically Adjusted P/E ratio, or CAPE, which they then use to forecast its future 10-year returns. In essence, Campbell and Shiller kill two birds with one large stone - they use the 10-year average to reduce noise...

Instrumental variables estimation can, in principle, avoid biases that ordinary least squares estimation suffers when explanatory variables are correlated with the disturbances. Finding appropriate instruments is a challenge. This paper uses seven recently published empirical papers to...

The popular 'airline' model for a seasonal time series assumes that a variable needs double differencing, i.e. first and seasonal (or annual) differencing. The resultant time series can usaually be described by a low order moving average model with estimated roots close to the unit circle. This...

There is a widespread tendency in the applied time series literature to interpret rejections of the unit root null hypothesis in favor of a trend stationary process with possible trend breaks as evidence that the data are better characterized as stationary about a broken trend. This...