We develop a quantitative model to select hedge funds in the long-short equity sector. The selection strategy is verified on a survivorship-bias-free hedge fund database, from January 1990 to September 2002. We focus on the hedge funds acting exclusively in the U.S. market. We identify...

We evaluate how deviations from normality may affect the allocation of assets. A Taylor expansion of expected utility allows us to focus on certain moments and to compute numerically the optimal portfolio allocation. A decisive advantage of our approach is that it remains operational even if a...

We evaluate how departure from normality may affect the conditional allocation of wealth. The expected utility function is approximated by a forth-order Taylor expansion that allows for non-normal returns. Market returns are characterized by a joint model that captures the time dependency and...

This paper reassesses, at the light of economic and financial theory, the well-documented recent evolution of the euro area public debt and equity markets. Doing so leads to associating the EMU and the single market with the changes in fundamentals and financial integration with convergence in...

This paper investigates the relative performance of local and foreign financial analysts on Latin American emerging markets. There is strong evidence that foreign financial analysts outperform local analysts on these markets. Foreign analysts produce more timely and more accurate forecasts. A...

This paper offers a systematized and updated view of competition between exchanges. It is divided in two parts: In the first part, we describe the recent reforms in stock exchanges and the main forces driving the development of competition. The second part surveys research done on stock exchanges.

This paper uses a simple model of mean-variance asset pricing with transaction costs to analyze one of the main empirical phenomena in stock market competition in the last years, the decrease of transaction costs. We endogenize transaction costs as variables strategically influenced by stock...

The paper investigates whether US, Japanese and European stock and government bond return indices are jointly priced within a conditional multivariate form of the international Capital asset Pricing Model during the period 1993-2001. It also explores the time variation of the price of market...

This paper analyses the consequences of the process of financial and economic integration on European equity markets. It documents significant changes in fundamentals, notably an increased synchronisation of macroeconomic activities, and a non-negligible evolution in pricing, with a decrease in...

The financial innovations of the late 1990s have led to the emergence of a significant number of new instruments, in particular in the market for hedging credit risk. This paper, based on an original dataset of transactions and quotes, looks at credit default swaps drawn on sovereign countries....