This paper provides a microfounded information acquisition technology based on a simple framework with information search. When searchable information is limited, an agent encounters increasingly more redundant information in his search for new information. Redundancy slows down the learning...

The authors introduce a new index of the business cycle that uses the Mahalanobis distance to measure the statistical similarity of current economic conditions to past episodes of recession and robust growth. Their index has several important features that distinguish it from the Conference...

Investors rely on the stock-bond correlation for a variety of tasks, such as forming optimal portfolios, designing hedging strategies, and assessing risk. Most investors estimate the stock-bond correlation simply by extrapolating the historical correlation of monthly returns and assume that this...

This paper studies option pricing based on a reverse engineering (RE) approach. We utilize artificial intelligence in order to numerically compute the prices of options. The data consist of more than 5000 call- and put-options from the German stock market. First, we find that option pricing...

We study the existence and uniqueness of minimal supersolutions of backward stochastic differential equations with generators that are jointly lower semicontinuous, bounded below by an affine function of the control variable and satisfy a specific normalization property. -- Supersolutions of...

Investors sometimes have strong convictions that a distinctive economic regime will prevail in the period ahead and therefore would like to form a portfolio that reflects the expected returns, standard deviations, and correlations of assets during such a regime. To do so, they typically isolate...

Crowding is widely regarded as one of the most important risk factors in designing portfolio strategies. In this paper, we analyze stock crowding using network analysis of fund holdings, which is used to compute crowding scores for stocks. These scores are used to construct costless long-short...

Throughout the paper, investment portfolios which consist of assets with variance-gamma, gamma and deterministically distributed returns are considered. We derive formulas which characterize the impact of a particular asset on the risks and gains of the portfolio. Namely, we obtain analytical...

Interest in hedge funds has grown tremendously over the past decade. As the market for hedge funds broadens, academics and practitioners are looking for new ways to examine these new financial vehicles. Currently, to uncover the factors that drive hedge fund returns, analysts either implement...

Despite ever more sophisticated risk management and measurement, investment professionals have generally overlooked a simple but powerful metric of relative risk and portfolio diversification -- the normal return gap. We develop a generalized specification of the expected difference in returns...