This study empirically tests the effect of diversification on firm performance, controlling for factors influencing returns other than diversification. This study also investigates if the diversification effect has the same impact on firm performance at different points in time. The sample used...

In the current environment of financial distress, many governments are likely to soon become major holders of financial assets, but the policy debate focuses only on the likelihood and extent of short-term market stabilization. This paper shows that government intervention and propping up are...

This study extends the herding measures proposed by Warmers (1999), Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny (1992) and Borensztein and Gaston (2003) for stocks overbought and oversold by institutional investors as well as the information content related to institutional herding proposed by Nofsinger and...

Creating a portfolio that consistently generates alpha—market-adjusted abnormal returns—is the holy grail of active management. Given that excess returns can come both from manager skill and from luck, some advocates of active management suggest that active funds should be combined...

We examine the option-implied volatility of the three most liquid ETFs (Diamonds, Spiders, and Cubes) and their respective tracking indices (Dow 30, S&P 500, and NASDAQ 100). We find that volatility smiles for ETF options are more pronounced than for index options, primarily because...

During the October 9, 2007-March 9, 2009 period, the U.S. stock market experienced the worst bear market in its history since the Great Depression. Empirical studies show that exchange-traded country index funds can provide portfolio diversification benefits to investors in bull markets....

In this study, we aim to discover whether the performance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can lead to abnormal returns, i.e., whether the execution of CSR can enhance the generation of abnormal returns. We sort companies according to their ratings in each sector (environmental, social,...

The author investigates the welfare cost of business cycles in an economy where households have heterogeneous trading technologies. In an economy with aggregate risk, the different portfolio choices induced by heterogeneous trading technologies lead to a larger consumption inequality in...

This paper proposes a new way to measure and deal with risk within the portfolio selection problem using a skewness/semivariance biobjective optimization framework. The solutions of this biobjective optimization problem allow the investor to analyse the efficient trade-off between skewness and...

Most research on option hedging has compared the performance of delta hedges derived from different stochastic volatility models with Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) deltas, and in particular with the `implied BSM’ model in which an option’s delta is based on its own market implied volatility....