To ensure a competent regulatory framework with respect to Value-at-Risk for establishing Bank's capital adequacy requirements, as promoted by the Basle Committee, then the parametrical approach to estimate VaR needs to incorporate fat tails, apparent in the return distributions of financial...

In this paper, we investigate whether real estate returns are driven by continental factors. This is especially relevant for determining the country allocation of international real estate portfolios. Strong continental factors imply that optimal diversification can only be achieved by investing...

In this paper we present the results of an international survey among 313 CFOs on capital budgeting, cost of capital, capital structure, and corporate governance. We extend previous results of Graham and Harvey (2001) by broadening their sample internationally, by including corporate governance,...

We examine the consequences of transparency in an experimental multiple-dealer market with asymmetrically informed dealers. Five professional securities traders make a market for a single security. In each trading round, one of the dealers (the quot;insiderquot;) is told the security's true...

International financial markets are becoming integrated. Hence, globalrisk factor are increasingly important for portfolio selection andasset pricing. The recent empirical finance literature has confirmedthat both the global market portfolio and exchange rate risk factorsconstitute important...

The growing importance of SRI in the investment arena has resulted in considerable academic interest in the performance of socially responsible equity mutual funds. Remarkably, no attempts have been made to evaluate the performance of mutual funds that invest in socially responsible fixed-income...

Factors represent certain parts in the market, which are more attractive in the long term than other parts. In the case of equities for example, leading academic studies demonstrate that momentum, small cap and low-volatility stocks systematically generate higher risk-adjusted returns. Factors...

We study the economic significance of social dimensions in investment decisions by analyzing the holdings of U.S. equity mutual funds over the period 2004-2012. Using these holdings, we measure funds' exposures to socially sensitive stocks in order to answer two questions. What explains...

There exists a widespread consensus among mainstream academics and investors that socially responsible investing (SRI) leads to inferior, rather than superior, portfolio performance. Using Innovest's well-established corporate eco-efficiency scores, we provide evidence to the contrary. We...

This study adds new insights to the long-running corporate environmental-financial performance debate by focusing on the concept of eco-efficiency. Using a new database of eco-efficiency ratings, we analyze the relation between eco-efficiency and financial performance from 1997 to 2004. We...