This paper shows that financial covenants have no value for creditors of highly levered firms, because an attempt to enforce their rights in technical default would result in a lower payoff than continued operations under shareholders' control. This explains the widespread use of cov-lite loans...

We develop 50 novel indices of State-level Economic Policy Uncertainty (SEPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency using 204 million state newspaper articles from January 1990 to December 2019. We assess the validity of our measures. Our SEPU indices vary counter-cyclically with respect to...

Capital market assumptions (CMAs), which are long-term risk and return forecasts for asset classes, are important pillars of the investment industry. However, applying them reliably in portfolio construction has been (and still is) a challenge in the industry. Despite the difficulties, this...

Long-term investors rebalance their portfolios given their views on the investment landscape. Portfolio tilting is often implemented using investors' views on point estimates of asset expected returns which are notoriously difficult to estimate and lead to unstable portfolio weights. We avoid...

DeMiguel et. al. (2009b) made a compelling case that estimation error dwarfs diversification benefits resulting in naive diversification (1/N) dominating mean-variance portfolios. We illustrate the necessary and sufficient conditions for risk-based allocation rules to be optimal in a...

There is a myriad of financial anomalies in the cross-section of equity returns. They have been widely studied in the literature, which gives investors a large choice in terms of investment styles. In this paper, the authors show a perhaps unappreciated quality of financial anomalies: they...

This material was presented at the Canadian Association of Alternative Strategies & Assets 2021 annual conference. It is based on the publish paper: Portfolio Tilts Using Views on Macroeconomic Regimes.Long-term investors tilt their portfolios given their views on the evolving investment...