The valuation of corporate debt is an important issue in asset pricing. While there has been an enormous amount of theoretical modeling of corporate bond prices, there has been relatively little empirical testing of these models. Recently there has been extensive development of rating based...

Many investors confine their mutual fund holdings to a single fund family, either for simplicity or through restrictions placed by their retirement savings plan. We find evidence that mutual fund returns are more closely correlated within than between fund families. As a result, restricting...

Many financial institutions employ outside portfolio managers to manage part or all of their investable assets. These institutions include pension funds, private endowments (e.g., colleges and charities), and private trusts. Pension funds are the largest and most likely organizations to employ...

The valuation of corporate debt is an important issue in asset pricing. While there has been an enormous amount of theoretical modeling of corporate bond prices, there has been relatively little empirical testing of these models 1 . Recently there has been extensive development of rating based...

To implement mean variance analysis one needs a technique for forecasting correlation coefficients. In this article we investigate the ability of several techniques to forecast correlation coefficients between securities. We find that separately forecasting the average level of pair-wise...

Many investors confine their mutual fund holdings to a single fund family, either for simplicity or through restrictions placed by their retirement savings plan. We find evidence that mutual fund returns are more closely correlated within fund families, which reduces the benefits of investor...

Many financial institutions employ outside portfolio managers to manage part or all of their investable assets. These institutions include pension funds, private endowments (e.g., colleges and charities), and private trusts. In 1999, the investment company institute estimated that these...

Financial theory is often based on the belief that the actions of rational investorsdetermine prices, which leads to the elimination of dominated financial instruments. Recently a series of articles have been published which question therationality of investor behavior. Standard and Poor s 500...

A number of papers have demonstrated that over historical periods, a specified set of factors have outperformed actively managed funds. However, in almost all cases, the factors employed or the procedures followed are not replicable by tradable passive investments. In addition, tradable passive...

Over 26% of investment company assets are held in passive managed vehicles. Thus, it is important to understand what affects the performance of passive vehicles and how to choose among the multiple passive options following any index. This paper examines the factors that are important in...