Index tracking has long been of interest for both industry of fund management andacademia. Various methods have been proposed and tested and various issues arediscussed throughout the past 30 years. Yet one issue remains unresolved is how toperform stock selection optimally. In this paper, I...

This paper examines cross-sectional relations between ex ante expected returns and betas. As a proxy for ex ante expected returns, we use implied returns obtained from the risk-adjusted option pricing model suggested in this paper. We find that implied returns have a positive and significant...

Prior research uses the basic one-period European call-option pricing model to compute default measures for individual firms and concludes that both the size and book-to-market effects are related to default risk. For example, small firms earn higher return than big firms only if they have...

The traditional futures hedge ratio (hT) is calculated ex post via economically structureless statistical analysis. Its lack of an economic foundation makes it inefficient and elevates its risk of error due to a regime shift. This paper proposes an ex ante, more efficient, carry cost rate (c)...

In this paper, we evaluate American-style, path-dependent derivatives with an artificial intelligence technique. Specifically, we use swarm intelligence to find the optimal exercise boundary for an American-style derivative. Swarm intelligence is particularly efficient (regarding computation and...

Prior research uses the basic one-period European call-option pricing model to compute default measures for individual firms and concludes that both the size and book-to-market effects are related to default risk. For example, small firms earn higher return than big firms only if they have...

This paper tests whether the traditional futures hedge ratio (hT) and the carry cost rate futures hedge ratio (hc) vary in accordance with the Sercu and Wu (2000) and Leistikow et al. (2019) "hc" theory. It does so, both within and across high and low spot asset carry cost rate (c) regimes. The...

In this paper, we evaluate American-style, path-dependent derivatives with an artificial intelligence technique. Specifically we use swarm intelligence to find the optimal exercise boundary for an American-style derivative. Swarm intelligence is particularly efficient (computation and accuracy)...

Since the 1970s, futures hedge ratios have traditionally been calculated ex-post using an economically structure-less statistical analysis. This paper proposes an ex-ante, more efficient, less computationally demanding, general “carry cost rate” based hedge ratio. Though the proposed hedge...

In this paper, we use a structural credit risk model developed by Geske (1977) and generalized by Chen et al. (2014) to assess the delinquency risk of U.S. Treasury debt implied by U.S. sovereign CDS spreads. We also use the fitted structural model to determine the implied debt ceiling for the...