We investigate the characteristics of infrastructure as an asset class from an investment perspective of a limited partner. While non U.S. institutional investors gain exposure to infrastructure assets through a mix of direct investments and private fund vehicles, U.S. investors predominantly...

The experience in the period during and after the Asian crisis of 1997-98 has provoked an extensive debate about the credit rating agencies' evaluation of sovereign risk in emerging markets lending. This study analyzes the role of credit rating agencies in international financial markets,...

Islamic equity funds (IEFs) differ fundamentally from conventional equity funds since Muslims are prohibited to invest in certain companies/sectors and pay or receive interest. This paper analyzes the risk and return characteristics of a sample of 145 IEFs over the period 2000 to 2009. Our...

We study the effects of the reform of the system of severance payments (TFR) of Italian employees on the cost and the access to credit for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The most direct consequence of the reform is to reduce in the long run the amount of liquid assets available to...

We study the relation between the credit cycle and macro-economic fundamentals in an intensity-based framework. Using rating transition and default data of U.S. corporates from Standard and Poor's over the period 1980 to 2005 we directly estimate the credit cycle from the micro rating data. We...

Deviations from normality in financial return series have led to the development of alternative portfolio selection models. One such model is the downside risk model, whereby the investor maximizes his return given a downside risk constraint. In this paper we empirically observe the...

This paper analyzes the performance and risk-return characteristics of three major emerging art markets: Russia, China, and India. According to three national art market indices, built by hedonic regressions based on auction sales prices, the geometric annual returns are 10.00%, 5.70%, and...

The art market has seen a sustained growth over the last years, but participation has been reserved for just a few investors. The paper proposes to overcome this problem by introducing a call option on an art index which is derived from one of the most comprehensive data sets of art market...