The empirical mean–variance evidence comparing the performance of Socially Responsible Investments (SRI) and conventional investments suggests that there is no significant difference between the two. This paper re-examines the problem in the context of Marginal Conditional Stochastic Dominance...

This paper uses the concept of Marginal Conditional Stochastic Dominance and a generalization of the 50% Portfolio Rule to develop a tractable and parsimonious methodology for constructing a second degree Stochastic Dominance (SSD) efficient portfolio from a given, inefficient index. Because the...

The weak empirical evidence linking diversification and international equity flows calls into question the diversification paradigm at the international level and the analytical framework it implies. Using the concept of Marginal Conditional Stochastic Dominance (MCSD) to estimate the...

Stochastic dominance is a more general approach to expected utility maximization than the widely accepted mean–variance analysis. However, when applied to portfolios of assets, stochastic dominance rules become too complicated for meaningful empirical analysis, and, thus, its practical...

The world market portfolio plays an important role in international asset pricing, but is unobservable in practice. We first propose a framework for constructing a market proxy that corresponds to the "market portfolio" of financial theory. We then construct this proxy, analyze its determinants...

In this paper we use the structural credit risk methodology of Merton (1974) to estimate country default risk as the country financial risk premium for eight of the largest Latin American economies - Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela - from 1986 to 2000. We...