Anecdotal evidence suggests that investor protection affects the demand for equity, but existing theories emphasize only the effect of investor protection on the supply of equity. We build a model showing that the demand for equity is important in explaining financial development. If the level...

Contrary to what traditional asset pricing would imply, a strategy that bets against beta, by going long in low beta stocks and short in high beta stocks, tends to outperform the market. We consider a market in which diversity is maintained, i.e. no single stock can dominate the entire market,...

We study mean-variance hedging under portfolio constraints in a general semimartingale model. The constraints are formulated via predictable correspondences, meaning that the trading strategy is restricted to lie in a closed convex set which may depend on the state and time in a predictable way....

The Markowitz problem consists of finding in a financial market a self-financing trading strategy whose final wealth has maximal mean and minimal variance. We study this in continuous time in a general semimartingale model and under cone constraints: Trading strategies must take values in a...

We solve the problem of mean-variance hedging for general semimartingale models via stochastic control methods. After proving that the value process of the associated stochastic control problem has a quadratic structure, we characterise its three coefficient processes as solutions of...

In this paper, a model of bounded rational investors investing their portfolio in a passive investment vehicle (e.g., an Exchange Traded Fund replicating a broad index) or an actively managed fund is presented. The model proposes that the quick reswitching of these short-term oriented investors...

This paper addresses the open debate about the effectiveness and practical relevance of highfrequency (HF) data in portfolio allocation. Our results demonstrate that when used with proper econometric models, HF data offers gains over daily data and more importantly these gains are maintained...

This paper addresses the open debate about the usefulness of high-frequency (HF) data in large-scale portfolio allocation. Daily covariances are estimated based on HF data of the S&P 500 universe employing a blocked realized kernel estimator. We propose forecasting covariance matrices using a...