We find that investors across the globe differentially prefer dividend-paying stocks over non-dividend-paying stocks more in declining markets than in advancing markets, whether in developed or emerging markets or before or after the 2008 global crisis, even accounting for growth opportunities,...

This paper analyses the role played by financial literacy in savings decisions and wealth decumulation. The broad evidence shows that (elderly) households do not decumulate their assets as they age, contradicting the standard life-cycle theory, which predicts that households should decumulate...

This paper features an analysis of the effectiveness of a range of portfolio diversification strategies as applied to a set of 17 years of monthly hedge fund index returns on a set of ten market indices representing 13 major hedge fund categories, as compiled by the EDHEC Risk Institute. The...

We consider optimal consumption and portfolio choice in the presence of Knightian uncertainty in continuous time. We embed the problem into the new framework of stochastic calculus for such settings, dealing in particular with the issue of non-equivalent multiple priors. We solve the problem...

We research the properties of implicit transaction costs function for general-shaped limit order book. Equivalent conditions for linearity of the function are presented in terms of market liquidity. We also present a suitable functional form of implicit costs for order-driven market on the...

Markowitz (1952) portfolio selection requires estimates of (i) the vector of expected returns and (ii) the covariance matrix of returns. Many successful proposals to address the first estimation problem exist by now. This paper addresses the second estimation problem. We promote a nonlinear...

This paper contrasts individual liability lending with and without groups to joint liability lending. By doing so, we shed light on an apparent shift away from joint liability lending towards individual liability lending by some microfinance institutions First we show that individual lending...

This paper addresses management of sovereign wealth from the perspective of the theory of contingent claims. Starting with the sovereign's balance sheet, we frame sovereign fund management as an asset-liability management (ALM) problem, covering all public entities and taking explicit account of...

This thesis deals with different problems related to markets with transaction costs and is composed of four parts.In part I, we begin with the study of assymptotic hedging a European option in a local volatility model with bid-ask spread.In part II, we study the optimal consumption problem in a...

A major issue in both Islamic finance and conventional finance is whether the shocks to the volatilities in the asset returns are substitutes or complements in terms of taking risk. An understanding of how volatilities of and correlations between asset returns change over time including their...