The paper examines the key drivers of gold investment. Since 2000 the gold price has risen drastically, making gold an interesting add-on to a portfolio. As gold futures have negative roll returns, gold pool accounts are characterized by high credit risk and physical possession of gold means...

Loss Given Default (LGD) is a major element for pricing credits and bonds. As there has been a substantial amount of research during the last years, this paper aims to give an overview. Initially, defaults and recovery definitions for credits and the differences to bonds are discussed. A survey...

Hedge Funds are often considered as a possibility for optimizing traditional portfolios due to their alternative risk factors and sources of return. But as the return distribution of hedge funds shows negative skewness and excess kurtosis, using portfolio optimization techniques, based on the...

Funds of Hedge Funds (FHF) are perceived to be the premier choice of institutional investors for first-time allocations into the alternative investment asset class. While many papers cover the bright side of FHF investing, we in this paper empirically investigate the maximum drawdowns of FHF....

Optimization of international securitized real estate portfolios has been a key topic for several decades. However, most previous analysis has focused on regional diversification by applying the traditional mean-variance (MV) framework suggested by Markowitz (1952) even if the limitations of...

Even though the introduction of the Euro did not necessitate tax harmonization per se, it is expected to lead to increasingly harmonized taxation in practice. This harmonization process will mainly take the form of negotiations on the level of EMU, where political recommendations will be...

This paper brings together the literature on determination of home bias in equity holdings and the portfolio balance model of exchange rates to consider whether the dollar might be affected by a change in transactions costs that alters international portfolio allocations. The empirical findings...

Schiffsinvestitionen haben in Deutschland eine lange Tradition und stellen für private Anleger — meist über geschlossene Fonds — und zunehmend auch für institutionelle Anleger eine bedeutende Form der Kapitalanlage dar. Trotz ihrer schon lange anhaltenden Beliebtheit und des hohen...

The financial crisis and the rescue measures taken by governments and central banks increased investors' interest in liquidity and in real assets supposed to offer a hedge against inflation. Against this background, we investigate empirically four real assets (real estate, commodities,...

We show that including distribution costs into a general equilibrium model of international portfolio choice contributes to explaining the 'home bias' in international equity investment. Our model is able to replicate observed investment positions for a wide range of parameter values, even if...