There are two volatility components embedded in the returns constructed using recorded stock prices: the genuine time-varying volatility of the unobservable returns that would prevail (in equilibrium) in a frictionless, full-information, economy and the variance of the equally unobservable...

We develop empirical tests for stochastic dominance efficiency of a given investment portfolio relative to all possible portfolios formed from a set of assets. Our tests use multivariate statistical methods, which results in good statistical power properties and increases the comparability with...

A popular explanation of aggregate stock market behavior suggests that assets are priced as if there were a representative investor whose utility is a power function of the difference between aggregate consumption and a quot;habitquot; level, where the habit is some function of lagged and...

The issue of performance measurement in the hedge fund industry has led to literature that is both abundant and controversial. The explanation for this complexity lies in the particular features of alternative funds. Hedge funds invest in a heterogeneous range of financial assets and cover a...

This paper develops a novel approach to simultaneously test for market timing in stock index returns and volatility. The tests are based on the estimation of a system of regression equations with indicator variables and provide detailed information about the statistical significance of...

Functional Signal plus Noise (FSN) time series models are introduced for the econometric analysis of the dynamics of a large cross-section of prices in which contemporaneous observations are functionally related. A semiparametric FSN model is developed in which a smooth, cubic spline signal...

We propose a semiparametric single-factor diffusion model for the term structure of interest rate. The model is highly flexible and encompasses most parametric single-factor models proposed in the literature. We fit the semiparametric model to a proxy of the Eurodollar short term interst rate...

Linear parabolic partial differential equations (PDE's) and diffusion models are closely linked through the celebrated Feynman-Kac representation of solutions to PDE's. In asset pricing theory, this leads to the representation of derivative prices as solutions to PDE's. We give a number of...

The paper analyzes the relationship between stock prices and fundamentals for a large sample of US stocks in the last ten years using a random coefficient model. Heterogeneity and omitted variable bias are properly taken into account with model coefficients being allowed to vary across time and...

The non-gaussianity of processes observed in financial markets and relatively good performance of gaussian models can be reconciled by replacing the Brownian motion with Levy processes whose Levy densities exhibit exponential decay, and the rate of decay is large. This leads to asymptotic...