Taking the case of high-pressure political reforms including the ongoing anti-corruption campaign in China, we investigate the impact of such reforms on the performance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) relative to non-SOEs from the agency problem perspective. We report that before the...

Observed international diversification implies an investment home bias (IHB). Can bivariate preferences with a local domestic peer group rationalize the IHB? For example, it is argued that wishing to have a large correlation with the Standard and Poor's 500 stock index (S&P 500 stock index) may...

A necessary condition for a dominance of prospect F over prospect G by all commonly employed investment criteria is E_F (x)≥E_G (x). Because of this requirement, optimal investment rules fail to distinguish between two alternative prospects where in practice one prospect is preferred over the...

Studies which attribute markets' seasonality to sentiment assume that seasonal affective disorder (SAD) creates seasonal fluctuations in risk-aversion which, in turn, affects prices. Employing the variance risk premium (VP), we directly test for seasonality in risk-aversion. We find significant...

In this study, the Mean-Variance framework is employed to analyze the impact of the Basel VaR market risk regulation on the institution's optimal investment policy, the stockholders' welfare, as well as the tendency of the institution to change the risk profile of the held portfolio. It is shown...

We analyze the optimal portfolio policies of expected utility maximizing agents under VaR Capital Requirement (VaR-CR) regulation in comparison to the optimal policy under exogenously-imposed VaR Limit (VaR-L) and Limited-Expected-Loss (LEL) regulations. With VaR-CR regulation the agent strategy...

This paper introduces a model-independent measure of aggregate idiosyncratic risk based on the mean-variance portfolio theory and the concept of gain from portfolio diversification. With the new approach, there is no need to estimate the covariance terms or the industry-level or firm-level beta...

We investigate whether risk seeking or non-concave utility functions can help to explain the cross-sectional pattern of stock returns. For this purpose, we analyze the stochastic dominance efficiency classification of the value-weighted market portfolio relative to benchmark portfolios based on...

This paper examines the proportion of wealth invested in stock and bond portfolios as a function of the investors' age, i.e., investment horizon. It has become increasingly popular to advice investors to relocate their funds from a primarily stock portfolio to a primarily bond portfolio as they...