Composite indicators are widely used to determine the ranking of countries, organizations or individuals in terms of overall performance on multiple criteria. Their calculation requires standardization of the individual statistical criteria and aggregation of the standardized indicators. These...

Full paper is available at: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3087336" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3087336.In this supplementary appendix to the paper Boudt, Cornilly and Verdonck (2019), we first provide a brief R tutorial for the proposed NC estimator. Then, we go into more detail about the shape of...

The tone of a firm's financial disclosure is increasingly used as a variable in panel data regressions to predict future performance and explain investors' reaction at earnings announcement. We investigate whether tone is informative, and argue that the informativeness of tone increases with the...

Supplementary Appendix is available at: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=2970015" https://ssrn.com/abstract=2970015. Decision making in finance often requires an accurate estimate of the coskewness matrix to optimize the allocation to random variables with asymmetric distributions. The classical...

In a risk-based portfolio, there is no explicit control for the performance per unit of risk taken. We propose a framework to evaluate the balance between risk and performance at both the portfolio and component level, and to tilt the risk-based portfolio weights towards a state in which the...

The choice of weighting method in constructing equity portfolio affects not only the financial performance, but also its Shariah-compliance. We show how the implicit bets in market capitalization weights, fundamental value weights, equal weights and low risk weights can affect the individual's...

This paper evidences the strategic positioning of positive and negative words within a CEO letter as a subtle form of impression management. We find that managers tend to present information in such an order that the reader of the CEO letter has a more positive perception of the underlying...

Implied expected returns are the expected returns for which a supposedly mean-variance efficient portfolio is effectively efficient given a covariance matrix. We analyze the statistical properties of monthly implied expected return estimates and study their sensitivity to the choice of a...

We define the outperformance (resp. underperformance) of an investment fund as the percentage of funds in the peer universe for which the true performance of the focal fund is higher (resp. lower). We show that the p-values of the pairwise tests of equal performance can be used to obtain...

The R package DEoptim implements the differential evolution algorithm. This algorithm is an evolutionary technique similar to genetic algorithms that is useful for the solution of global optimization problems. In this note we provide an introduction to the package and demonstrate its utility for...