It is widely known that the small but looming possibility of default renders the expected return distribution for financial products containing credit risk to be highly skewed and fat tailed. In this paper we apply recent techniques developed for incorporating the additional risk faced by...

This paper analyzes the properties of multivariate tests of purchasing power parity (PPP) that fail to take heterogeneity in the speed of mean reversion across real exchange rates into account. We compare the performance of homogeneous and heterogeneous unit root testing methodologies. The...

International financial markets are becoming integrated. Hence, global risk factor are increasingly important for portfolio selection and asset pricing. The recent empirical finance literature has confirmed that both the global market portfolio and exchange rate risk factors constitute important...

Based on a survey of behavioral finance literature, this paper presents a descriptive model of individual investor behavior in which investment decisions are seen as an iterative process of interactions between the investor and the investment environment. This investment process is influenced by...

Unlike their US counterparts, European convertible debt issuers tend to be large companies with small debt- and equity-related financing costs. Therefore, it is a puzzle why these firms issue convertibles instead of standard financing instruments. This paper examines European convertible debt...

This study proposes a test for mean-variance efficiency of a given portfolio under general linear investment restrictions. We introduce a new definition of pricing error or “alpha” and as an efficiency measure we propose to use the largest positive alpha for any vertex of the portfolio...

In this paper we explore the relevance of dividends in the total equity return over longer time horizons. In addition, we investigate the effects of different reinvestment assumptions of dividends. We use a unique set of revised and corrected US equity data series, comprising monthly prices and...

In this paper we evaluate applications of (return based) style analysis. The portfolio and positivity constraints imposed by style analysis are useful in constructing mimicking portfolios without short positions. Such mimicking portfolios can be used e.g. to construct efficient portfolios of...

In this paper, I present a theory of management control based on Transaction Cost Economics. This theory seeks to integrate into a single framework a set of insights as to the nature of the organization's activities, the control problems that are inherent in these activities, and the unique...

We document the importance of the choice of error measure (percentage vs. logarithmic errors) for the comparison of alternative valuation procedures. We demonstrate for several multiple valuation methods (averaging with the arithmetic mean, harmonic mean, median, geometric mean) that the ranking...