This paper presents a model that measures the impact of political risk on portfolio investment when the political risks are multivariate and correlated across countries. The multivariate approach generalizes the single country model but retains most of its characteristics in terms of its ability...

This paper looks at divestitures by 144 UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange from 1985 to 1991 and investigates whether and how accurately investors price the firm's option to abandon assets in exchange for their exit value. Theory prices this real option as an American style put and the...

This paper develops new financial theory to link the third order stochastic dominance for risk-averse and risk-seeking investors and provide illustration of application in risk management. We present some interesting new properties of third order stochastic dominance (TSD) for risk-averse and...

This paper investigates whether and how political connections influence managerial financial decisions. Our study reveals that those firms that have a politician on its board of directors are highly leveraged, use more long-term debt, hold large excess cash and are associated with low quality...

Passive index investing involves the low cost strategy of investing in a fund that replicates or, more often, tracks a market index. Enhanced indexation uses the returns of an index as a reference point and aims at outperforming this index. The intuition behind enhanced indexing is that market...

Because heterogenous and unknown shareholder utility functions make it difficult to define a corporate objective common to all shareholders based on utility, the traditional theory of the firm concentrates on wealth maximization as the main measure of performance. Using the concept of ranked...

This paper uses the expected utility framework to examine the optimal hedging decision for commodities with mean reverting price processes. The derived results show that when commodity prices follow a mean reverting process, the optimal hedge ratio differs significantly from the classical...

We propose a theoretical framework for constructing a market proxy that corresponds to the ldquo;market portfoliordquo; of financial theory. We construct this proxy, analyze its determinants and test its efficiency and explanatory power over the period 1974-2003 with respect to the return...

In this paper we generalize the Clark-Jokung 50% portfolio theorem(Management Science, 1999) to an arbitrary threshold and we apply it to a wide and well-known family of distributions, the elliptical distributions (multivariate normal, Student t, multivariate exponential,...). We consider the...

The weak empirical evidence linking diversification and international equity flows calls into question the diversification paradigm at the international level and the analytical framework it implies. Using a novel measure of diversification that includes all the moments of the distribution of...