Estimating a forward-looking monetary policy rule by the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) has become a popular approach since the influential paper by Clarida, Gali, and Gertler (1998). However, an abundant econometric literature underlines the unappealing small-samples properties of GMM...

We develop a new methodology that measures conditional dependency. We achieve this by using copula functions that link marginal distributions, here chosen to obey a GARCH-type model with time-varying skewness and kurtosis. We apply this model to daily returns of stock-market indices. We find...

Designing an investment strategy in transition economies is a difficult task, because stock markets opened through time, time series are short, and there is little guidance how to obtain expected returns and covariance matrices necessary for mean-variance asset allocation. Moments of market...

In this paper, we investigate the performance-growth relation of French mutual funds. Using panel techniques, we find that capital inflows to French past top performing funds are not as strong as expected. This result suggests that there exist barriers to investment, that may come from the fact...

We evaluate how departure from normality may affect the allocation of assets. A Taylor series expansion of the expected utility allows to focus on certain moments and to compute numerically the optimal portfolio allocation. A decisive advantage of this approach is that it remains operational...

This paper investigates the implications of cross-country heterogeneity within the euro area for the design of optimal monetary policy. We build an optimizing-based multi-country model (MCM) describing the euro area in which differences between structural parameters across countries are allowed....

This note estimates several constrained versions of an optimization-based multi-country model to test the sources of heterogeneity within the euro area. We show that the main source is the asymmetry of shocks affecting the economies and that the heterogeneity of behaviors does not seem to be of...

The Gram-Charlier expansion, where skewness and kurtosis directly appear as parameters, has become popular in Finance as a generalization of the normal density. We show how positivity constraints can be numerically implemented, thereby guaranteeing that the expansion defines a density. The...

We propose a methodology for measuring the market-implied capital of banks by subtracting from the market value of equity (market capitalization) a credit-spread-based correction for the value of shareholders' default option. We show that without such a correction, the estimated impact of a...

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores are the main tool for asset managers in designing and implementing ESG investment strategies. They amalgamate a broad range of fundamentally different factors, creating ambiguity for investors as to the signals of higher or lower ESG scores. We...