Levy and Roll (Review of Financial Studies, 2010) have recently revived the debate related to the market portfolio's efficiency suggesting that it may be mean-variance efficient after all. This paper develops an alternative test of portfolio mean-variance efficiency based on the realistic...

During World War II, the art market experienced a massive boom in occupied countries. The discretion, the inflation proof character, the absence of market intervention and the possibility to resell artworks abroad have been suggested to explain why investing in artworks was one of the most...

A summary of this paper, by Deborah Kidd, has been published in CFA Digest, February 2011, vol 41, N°1

Art is often used as an investment vehicle. Given the importance of market efficiency in finance, we use a large auction-based index to test whether the art market is weakly efficient. Evidence reveals that returns on artworks exhibit high positive auto-correlation. We attribute this result to...

History provides many insights to address the issue of sovereign debt defaults. This article first presents a detailed account of defaults in historical perspective. It then discusses the solutions devised in the past to address sovereign debt crises and puts these into perspective with...