The Fama and French (F&F) factors do not reliably estimate the size and book-to-market effects. Our paper shows that the former has been underestimated in the US market while the latter overestimated. We do so by replacing F&F's independent rankings by the conditional ones introduced by Lambert...

In this primer, we review the classical methods for assessing the performance of a financial portfolio. The analysis relies on benchmarking the return on the portfolio with that of a peer group. We define and discuss the pros and cons of four performance metrics that are theoretically consistent...

Green (1984) demonstrates in a one-period setting that convertible debt can eliminate the asset substitution problem. However, in a multi-period setting the terms of the convertible issue will in general be set before the specific asset substitution opportunity presents itself. This leaves room...

This paper revisits the traditional return-based style analysis (RBSA) in presence of time-varying exposures and errors-in-variables (EIV). We first apply a selection algorithm using the Kalman filter to identify the more appropriate benchmarks for the analysed fund return. Then, we compute...

This paper analyzes the impact of corporate international diversification (CID) on domestic and world betas through the notion of psychic distance between countries. Using a large European sample of 598 firms, our findings indicate that this dimension significantly influences corporate risk...

We examine the ability of the factor model approach to evaluate the performance and persistence of hedge fund returns. In our analysis we incorporate traditional asset based factors as well as an array of new and previously studied option based factors. We provide evidence that there is still...

Empirical research on the performance of managed portfolios with multi-index models has only been using the alpha as performance metric. This paper assesses the ranking abilities of the alpha, the Information Ratio and the Generalized Treynor Ratio proposed by Huuml;bner (2005) on a sample of...

This paper proposes a methodology to analyze the implications of the Advanced Measurement Approach (AMA) put forward by the Basel II Accord for the assessment of operational risk. We develop an integrated procedure for the construction of the distribution of aggregate losses, using internal and...

This paper tests the performance of 2894 hedge funds in a time period that encompasses unambiguously bullish and bearish trends whose pivot is commonly set at March 2000. Our database proves to be fairly trustable with respect to the most important biases in hedge funds studies, despite the high...