In order to shed light on the "black box" of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

An intensive and still growing body of research focuses on estimating a portfolio’s Value-at-Risk.Depending on both the degree of non-linearity of the instruments comprised in the portfolio and thewillingness to make restrictive assumptions on the underlying statistical distributions, a...

This paper applies the dichotomous theory of choice by Zou (2000a) tothe analysis of investmentstrategies and security markets. Issues concerning individualoptimality, (approximate) arbitrage,capital market equilibrium, and Pareto efficiency are studied undervarious market conditions. Among the...

Policy portfolios are a fixture of institutional investment management, but they may not serve the purposes for which they are intended. A policy portfolio serves primarily as an expression of an investor's return and risk preferences. Secondarily, it serves as a benchmark for determining the...

This paper proposes a theoretical analysis on the impacts of using a suboptimal information set on the three main components used in asset pricing, namely the risk physical and neutral measures and the relative pricing kernel.The analysis is carried out by means of a portfolio optimization...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...

Gold, in all its forms, is certainly one of the most attractive assets in its last ten years: 266.8% for physical gold and 348.6% for gold mining shares while MSCI World posted -11.7% (from December 31, 2000 to December 31, 201'8 EUR hedged). We propose a general analysis to include this asset...

This paper investigates whether an investor is made better off by including commodities in a portfolio that consists of traditional asset classes. First, we revisit the posed question within an in-sample setting by employing mean–variance and non-mean–variance spanning tests. Then, we form...

Investors' holding periods determine how transaction costs are amortized and priced as liquidity premium in asset returns. Using a dataset containing two million trades made by over 66,000 households, this paper shows that transaction costs are an important determinant of investors' holding...

Target-Date Funds (TDFs) facilitate retirement planning by varying asset allocation over time with the goal of reducing portfolio risk. We explore potential agency problems in TDFs by examining their return performance and flow-performance relation. We find that TDFs under-perform balanced funds...