This dissertation contains two essays in empirical finance. The first essay studies the mutual fund industry, and the second essay looks into the stock market. Both studies provide insights in the underlying mechanism of some asset return patterns identified from the data currently available.The...

Using generating functions, the top-order zonal polynomials that occur in much distribution theory under normality can be recursively related to other symmetric functions (power-sum and elementary symmetric functions, Ruben [19], Hillier, Kan, and Wang [9]). Typically, in a recursion of this...

When a benchmark model is inefficient, including additional assets to the benchmark portfolios can improve its performance. In reality, however, the efficiency of a benchmark model relative to a given set of test assets is ex ante unknown, and the optimal portfolio is constructed based on...

For many multi-factor asset pricing models proposed in the recent literature, their implied tang-ency portfolios have substantially higher sample Sharpe ratios than that of the value-weighted market portfolio. In contrast, such high sample Sharpe ratio is rarely delivered by professional fund...

Assets with nonzero alphas are supposed to provide performance improvement relative to the benchmark portfolios. However, when the mean and covariance matrix of asset returns are estimated with errors, it is unclear whether the performance improvement can be realized. In this paper, we analyze...

Sample autocorrelation coefficients are widely used to test the randomness of a time series. Despite its unsatisfactory performance, the asymptotic normal distribution is often used to approximate the distribution of the sample autocorrelation coefficients. This is mainly due to the lack of an...

The top-order zonal polynomials Ck(A),and top-order invariant polynomials Ck1,...,kr(A1,...,Ar)in which each of the partitions of ki,i = 1,..., r,has only one part, occur frequently in multivariate distribution theory, and econometrics - see, for example Phillips (1980, 1984, 1985, 1986),...

<p>Using generating functions, the top-order zonal polynomials that occur in much distribution theory under normality can be recursively related to other symmetric functions (power-sum and elementary symmetric functions, Ruben, Hillier, Kan, and Wang). Typically, in a recursion of this type the...</p>

The top-order zonal polynomials Ck(A),and top-order invariant polynomials Ck1,...,kr(A1,...,Ar)in which each of the partitions of ki,i = 1,..., r,has only one part, occur frequently in multivariate distribution theory, and econometrics - see, for example Phillips (1980, 1984, 1985, 1986),...