This paper investigates a sample of 27 OECD countries to test whether national elections induce higher stock market volatility. It is found that the countryspecific component of index return variance can easily double during the week around an Election Day, which shows that investors are...

We use a unique and comprehensive data set on open-end real estate funds in Germany to study a liquidity crisis that hit this industry between 2005 and 2006. Since this industry is comparably unregulated our data set permits us to contrast competing explanations of liquidity crisis. We find that...

Alan Greenspan's paper (March 2010) presents his retrospective view of the crisis. His theme has several parts. First, the housing price bubble, its subsequent collapse and the financial crisis were not predicted either by the market, the FED, the IMF or the regulators in the years leading to...

Technical trading strategies assume that past changes in prices help predict future changes. This makes sense if the past price trend reflects fundamental information that has not yet been fully incorporated in the current price. However, if the past price trend only reflects temporary pricing...

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

The estimation of expected security returns is one of the major tasks for the practical implementation of the Markowitz portfolio optimization. Against this background, in 1992 Black and Litterman developed an approach based on (theoretically established) expected equili-brium returns which...

The most relevant practical impediment to an application of the Markowitz portfolio selection approach is the problem of estimating return moments, in particular return expectations. We analyze the consequences of using return estimates implied by analysts' dividend forecasts under the explicit...

We show analytically under quite general conditions that implied rates of return based on analysts' earnings forecasts are only a downward biased estimator for future expected one-period returns and therefore not suited for computing market risk premia. The extent of this bias is substantial as...

A decent budgetary portfolio is nothing more, and nothing less, than an accumulation of advantages that develop in quality and produce abundance money for the financial specialist to spend or reinvest. Markowitz (1959) is one of the pioneers of present day portfolio hypothesis. Generally, the...

We develop a copula-based pairs trading framework and apply it to the S&P 100 index constituents from 1990 to 2014. We propose an integrated approach, using copulas for pairs selection and trading. Essentially, we fit t-copulas to all possible combinations of pairs in a 12 month formation...