Three essays comprise this dissertation. The first essay uses panel data to show that labor income risk alone cannot explain limited stock market participation. However, transaction costs and household demographics, considered jointly, can determine both the discrete choice of whether to hold...

In this paper we analize the consistency of financial indexes and the ordering of investments based on the mean-variance and the stochastic dominance (SD) approaches. We take 47 mutual funds from the Chilean financial market in order to compute several algorithms that enable us to verify...

This paper tests the hypothesis that portfolio diversification can increase the threat of systemic financial risk. The paper provides first a theoretical rationale for the possibility that systemic risk may be increased by the proliferation of financial instruments that lead operators to hold...

We analyze a very thorough data base, including all of the bid/ask orders and daily portfolio values of more than 600 on-line amateur traders from February 2007 to June 2009. These traders were taking part in a stock-exchange contest proposed by the French Internet stock-exchange site...

This paper explores integration and contagion among US metropolitan housing markets. The analysis applies Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) house price repeat sales indexes from 384 metropolitan areas to estimate a multi-factor model of U.S. housing market integration. It then identifies...

We propose a stochastic spanning approach to assess whether a traditional portfolio of stocks and bonds spans augmented portfolios including commodities, foreign exchange, and real estate. We empirically show that in all seven portfolio combinations, the augmented portfolio is not spanned by the...

Mutual fund investors are concerned with the selection of the best fund in terms of performance among the set of alternative funds. This paper proposes an innovative mutual funds performance evaluation measure in the context of multicriteria decision making. We implement a multicriteria...

We propose a novel approach to cross-sectional equities sample selection, derived from best market practice in index construction and focused on investability. Using the U.K. market as a template, we first demonstrate how the popular Datastream dataset is plagued by data deficiencies that would...

Although the existing literature of Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) on different categories of stock markets is vast, it is non-existent in the case of frontier stock markets (defined as very small capital markets). This paper fills this gap by investigating how APT performs in a frontier stock...

We study the behavior and interaction of systematic and idiosyncratic components of risk in a cross-section of U.K. stocks. We find no clear evidence of a trend in any component of total risk, but we document different “regimes” in the behavior of each component of total risk, in their...