This paper addresses the open debate about the effectiveness and practical relevance of high-frequency (HF) data in portfolio allocation. Our results demonstrate that when used with proper econometric models, HF data offers gains over daily data and more importantly these gains are maintained...

Portfolio construction and risk budgeting are the focus of many studies by academics and practitioners. In particular, diversification has spawn much interest and has been defined very differently. In this paper, we analyze a method to achieve portfolio diversification based on the decomposition...

Ever since Harry Markowitz published his seminal paper on portfolio selection, investors have incorporated estimates of future volatilities and correlations into their asset allocation process. While portfolio construction methods continue to evolve, many investors continue to forecast...

Gone are the days when inflation fears had receded under years of 'Great Moderation' in macroeconomics. The US subprime financial crisis, the ensuing 'Great Recession' and the sovereign debt scares that spread throughout much of the industrialized world brought about a new order characterized by...

Recent academic studies have shown that since the mid-nineties, the pass-through of exogenous oil shocks into headline inflation has been increasing while the pass through into core inflation seems to have ceased. This paper explores the implications in terms of commodity allocation for...

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...

Should long-term investors account for time-variation in model parameters? We develop a time-varying Vector Autoregressive model that can handle time-variation in intercepts, slopes, volatility and correlation, the leverage effect in volatility and fat tails. Long-term investors should take...

We investigate the direct connection between the uncertainty related to estimated stable ratios of stock prices and risk and return of two pairs trading strategies: a conditional statistical arbitrage method and an implicit arbitrage one. A simulation-based Bayesian procedure is introduced for...

Many financial decisions such as portfolio allocation, risk management, option pricing and hedge strategies are based on forecasts of the conditional variances, covariances and correlations of financial returns. The paper shows an empirical comparison of several methods to predict one-step-ahead...