In this paper, we study the quality of commodity futures markets. We investigate the impact of two major changes: (1) The influx of index investors after 2004 (financialization) and (2) the introduction of side-by-side trading of open-outcry and electronic limit order markets around mid-2006...

For centuries, Jews have been associated with financial services. We find that present-day households in German counties where Jewish persecution was higher in the Middle Ages and the Nazi period invest less in stocks, have lower savings in bank deposits, and are less likely to get a mortgage,...

This article analyzes the issue of American option valuation when the underlying exhibits a GARCH-type volatility process. We propose the usage of Rubinstein's Edgeworth binomial tree (EBT) in contrast to simulation-based methods being considered in previous studies. The EBT-based valuation...

Price movements in many commodity markets exhibit significant seasonal patterns. In this paper, we study the effects of seasonal volatility on models' option pricing performance. In terms of options pricing, a deterministic seasonal component at the price level can be neglected. In contrast,...

Risk proxies such as beta, volatility or standard deviation are conventionally measured assuming that investors have symmetric risk preferences, with upside and downside deviations from the expectation being equivalently undesirable. Responsible investors, however, have the dual aims of...

We analyze the relation between time-series predictability and factor investing. We use a large set of financial, macroeconomic, and technical variables to time-series-manage the market portfolio. A combination of the out-of-sample market excess return forecasts of all variables yields a managed...

We comprehensively analyze the most prominent factors proposed in the corporate bond literature. Using a Bayesian model selection approach, we simultaneously compare all 1,024 different possible subsets of these factors. A model including the bond market, term risk, credit risk, short-term...