This paper takes a close look at the 'behavioural finance' explanations of the equity premium puzzle, namely myopic loss aversion (Benartzi and Thaler, 1995) and disappointment aversion (Ang, Bekaert and Liu, 2000). The paper proposes a simple specification of loss and disappointment aversion...

Performance fees for portfolio managers are designed to align the managers' goals withthose of the investors and to motivate managers to aquire "superior" information and tomake better investment decisions. A part of the literature analyzes performance fees on thebasis of market valuation. In...

In this paper we examine the problem of partially hedging a given credit risk exposure. We derive hedges which satisfy certain optimality criteria: For a given investment into the hedge they minimize the remaining risk, or vice versa. This is motivated by the fact that it is a core business of...

Following [10] we continue the study of the problem of expected utility maximization in incomplete markets. Our goal is to find minimal conditions on a model and a utility function for the validity of several key assertions of the theory to hold true....

Vorliegendes Arbeitspapier analysiert die Einflüsse intertemporaler Renditezusammenhänge und fester Startwerte in Vektorautoregressions-(VAR-) Modellen für stetige Renditen anhand des Vergleichs mit einem statischen Random-Walk-Modell.

This paper argues that book-to-market and size attributes represent sensitivities of firm returns to several risk factors, and in so doing they subsume the information in other attributes.

The question that this paper raise in this paper is how to choose the best mix of countries to diversify internationally? They compare several methods of asset allocation from a Swiss perspective over the period 1988-2001.

Starting from the Merton framework for firm defaults, we provide theanalytics and robustness of the relationship between defaultprobabilities and default correlations. We show that loans with higherdefault probabilities will not only have higher variances but also highercorrelations with other...

We explore the role of corporate insiders vs. firms as traders of last resort. We develop a simple model of insider trading in which insiders provide price support, as well as liquidity, in security markets. Consistent with the model predictions we find that in the US markets insiders’ trading...

The objective of this paper is twofold: (1) to analyze an optimal portfolio rebalancing by a fund manager in response to a "volatility shock" in one of the asset markets, under sufficiently realistic assumptions about the fund manager's performance criteria and portfolio restrictions; and (2) to...