It has been suggested that domestic liabilities may be an important factor in explaining the existence of a home bias in international investment portfolios. This paper provides a theoretical justification for this claim in a mean-variance framework. However, an empirical analysis for the UK...

In this article, we study the effect of liquidity risk on the performance of various hedge fund portfolio strategies. The portfolio strategies in each hedge fund style are formed by incorporating predictability in: (i) managerial skills, (ii) fund risk loadings, and (iii) benchmark returns. As...

This paper studies the performance of mutual funds around the world using a sample of 10,568 open-end actively managed equity funds from 19 countries between 1999 and 2005. Performance is measured using four alternative benchmark models, including an international version of the Cahart...

We consider a pension plan with the option of early retirement, and paid benefits $\Psi (S,t)$ based on salary S at the time of retirement, but with guaranteed minimum; $S=S(t)$ is a Markov process. Denote by V(S,t) the financial value of the retirement benefits; its formal definition is given...

We live in an uncertain world, yet a lot of research into the sustainability of welfare states is done in the context of certainty. There are good reasons why the analysis is mostly confined to a model of a certain world. <span style="color: #000000;">A full analysis of the sustainability of welfare states which includes...</span>

Attempts to shore up the classic single-employer, defined-benefit pension plan are the wrong response to Canada’s occupational pension problems. While tax and regulatory changes can help, Canadians need a new approach to retirement income that will pool risks, control costs, and avoid the...

This paper is a draft for the chapter "German banks and banking structure" of the forthcoming book "The German financial system" edited by J.P. Krahnen and R.H. Schmidt (Oxford University Press). As such, the paper starts out with a description of past and present structural features of the...

This chapter focuses on institutional investors in the German financial markets. Institutional investors are specialized financial intermediaries who collect and manage funds on behalf of small investors toward specific objectives in terms of risk, return and maturity. The major types of...

Investors traditionally rely on credit ratings to price debt instruments. However, rating agencies are known to be prudent in their approach to rating revisions, which results in delayed ratings adjustments to mutating credit conditions. For a large set of eurobonds we derive credit spread...

The skewness in physical distributions of equity index returns and the implied volatility skew in the risk-neutral measure are subjects of extensive academic research. Much attention is now being focused on models that are able to capture time-varying conditional skewness and kurtosis. For this...