The Sharpe ratio is the most widely used metric for comparing performance across investment managers and strategies, and the information ratio is as commonly used to evaluate performance relative to a benchmark. Although it is widely recognized that non-linearities arising from the inclusion of...

The authors introduce a new index of the business cycle that uses the Mahalanobis distance to measure the statistical similarity of current economic conditions to past episodes of recession and robust growth. Their index has several important features that distinguish it from the Conference...

Investors have traditionally relied on mean-variance analysis to determine a portfolio’s optimal asset mix, but they have struggled to incorporate private equity into this framework because they do not know how to estimate its risk. The observed volatility of private equity returns is...

The authors apply a Hidden Markov Model to identify regimes of shifting inflation and then employ an attribution technique based on the Mahalanobis distance to identify the economic variables that determine the trajectory of inflation. Their analysis enables policymakers to focus on the most...

Investors typically measure an asset’s potential to diversify a portfolio by its correlations with the portfolio’s other assets, but correlation is useful only if it provides a good estimate of how an asset’s returns co-occur cumulatively with the other asset returns over the investor’s...

Factor investing has gained widespread acceptance among institutional investors. Some investors believe it is preferable to stratify the investment universe into factors to manage portfolio risk more effectively, while other investors focus on factors because they believe they yield risk...

The authors describe a new statistical concept called relevance from a conceptual and mathematical perspective, and based on their mathematical framework, they present a unified theory of relevance, regressions, and event studies. They also include numerical examples of how relevance is used to...