It is a well-known stylized fact that financial returns are non-normal and tend to have fat-tailed distributions. This paper presents a methodology that accurately estimates the degree of fat-tailedness, characterized by the tail-index, in small samples. We present a simple approach based on the...

In this paper we examine the effects of the amount of trade disclosure in an experimental financial market, in which nine professional traders set quotes and trade continuously. In addition to these market makers, two computerized external customers interact, representing both informed and...

Copulas offer financial risk managers a powerful tool to model the dependence between the different elements of a portfolio and are preferable to the traditional, correlation-based approach. In this paper, we show the importance of selecting an accurate copula for risk management. We extend...

In this paper we empirically investigate to what extent three competing asset pricing models price an individual firm's stock differently in an internationally integrated world: (i) the multifactor ICAPM of Solnik-Sercu including both the global market portfolio and exchange rate risk premiums,...

Increasing capital market integration has important implications for the calculation of the cost of capital. In an integrated world the cost of capital should be determined using the International Capital Asset Pricing Model rather than the domestic Capital Asset Pricing Model. In this paper we...

Risk premia, peso-problems and market-inefficiencies have been suggested as candidate explanations for the apparent rejection of the unbiased hypothesis. If various explanations interact, a panel approach is called for. In this paper we estimate different panel models, that allow for...

The paper looks at currency hedging and international diversification of equity portfolios from a safety first perspective. We modify Arzac and Bawa's (1977) version of the Roy's safety first criterion and show how it can be successfully improved upon by exploiting the fat tail property of asset...

In this paper hedging foreign currency exposure is reconsidered. We investigate the sensitivity of hedge ratios for the well-documented existence of unconditional kurtosis in asset and exchange rate returns. We derive theoretical hedge ratios for fat-tailed asset return distributions and find...

In this paper we investigate purchasing power parity (PPP) in a panel with 17 countries for the period 1972 through 1996. The novel feature of our panel methodology is that results are invariant to the choice of a benchmark on numeraire currency. In the panel we allow individual country effects...

For three out of five major stockmarkets it is found that those levels which are a multitude of a hundred are approached and transgressed infrequently. We explicitly test for the effect of sample bias and conduct a forecasting experiment