Markowitz (1952) portfolio selection requires an estimator of the covariance matrix of returns. To address this problem, we promote a nonlinear shrinkage estimator that is more flexible than previous linear shrinkage estimators and has just the right number of free parameters (that is, the...

Professional market participants have to deal with illiquid securities on a constant basis. For such securities traditional risk assessment techniques fail. This can lead to underestimated and distorted results for the entire investment portfolio, and ultimately to inadequate risk management. We...

Ethanol has been the subject of intense debate following the adoption of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct) which established that the gasoline supply in the United States (U.S.) must contain 10% ethanol. This work seeks to identify hedging ratios using dynamic multivariate GARCH to best...

We provide a methodology for credit risk analysis that can be embedded into a risk appetite framework. We start by estimating a global risk factor using CDS data, and we analyze the information content in a wide set of financial indicators on the global risk factor as well as on credit risk at...

Handling risk factors in the context of a multi-asset risk parity portfolio allocation has created increased interest in recent literature. When allocating along risk factors through principal components, one major problem that persists is the potential existence of leverage or short positions...

Recent years have seen increased demand from institutional investors for passive replication products that track the performance of hedge fund strategies using liquid investable assets such as futures contracts. In practice, linear replication methods suffer from poor tracking performance and...

Research Question: The investigation of the optimal allocation of current assets. Motivation: Current assets investment is a decision process which affects firm value. In this paper, we develop a framework that encompasses these decisions by taking into consideration the trade-off between risk...

Using NCRIEF farmland and timberland smoothed indices over the period from 1992Q1 to 2012Q3 and a new de-smoothing approach offered by Fisher et al. (1994), we explore the mean-variance diversification features of farmland and timberland assets. Our empirical results show that diversification...