We propose a new test of the stochastic dominance efficiency of a given portfolio over a class of portfolios. We establish its null and alternative asymptotic properties, and define a method for consistently estimating critical values. We present some numerical evidence that our tests work well...

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 article, we demonstrate that a direct relation exists between the context of Japanese firms indicating relative distress and conditional return distribution properties. We map cross-sectional vectors with company characteristics on vectors with return feature vectors, using a fuzzy...

The euro area has faced a high number of monetary and policy changes in the recent past as a consequence of the European integration process and, naturally, these developments have important implications for portfolio diversification and asset pricing. Therefore, this paper concentrates on the...

In this paper we study the impact of macroeconomic news announcements on the conditional volatility of stock and bond returns. Using daily returns on the S&P 500 index, the NASDAQ index, and the 1 and 10 year U.S. Treasury bonds, for January 1982 - August 2001, some interesting results emerge....

We investigate whether risk seeking or non-concave utility functions can help to explain the cross-sectional pattern of stock returns. For this purpose, we analyze the stochastic dominance efficiency classification of the value-weighted market portfolio relative to benchmark portfolios based on...

FIRST-ORDER STOCHASTIC DOMINANCE (FSD) is one of the fundamental concepts of decision making under uncertainty, relying only on the assumption of nonsatiation, or decision makers preferring more to less. There exist well-known, simple algorithms for establishing FSD relationships between a pair...

Downside risk, when properly defined and estimated, helps to explain the cross-section of US stock returns. Sorting stocks by a proper estimate of downside market beta leads to a substantially larger cross-sectional spread in average returns than sorting on regular market beta. This result...

This paper develops a reinvestment strategy for private equity which aims to keep its portfolio weight equal to a desired strategic allocation, while taking into account the illiquid nature of private equity. Historical simulations (1980-2005) show that our dynamic strategy is capable of...

This paper discusses statistical inference on the second-order stochastic dominance (SSD) efficiency of a given portfolio relative to all portfolios formed from a set of assets. We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of the Post test statistic for SSD efficiency. Unfortunately, a test...