Passive index investing involves the low cost strategy of investing in a fund that replicates or, more often, tracks a market index. Enhanced indexation uses the returns of an index as a reference point and aims at outperforming this index. The intuition behind enhanced indexing is that market...

This paper presents a model that measures the impact of political risk on portfolio investment when the political risks are multivariate and correlated across countries. The multivariate approach generalizes the single country model but retains most of its characteristics in terms of its ability...

This paper looks at divestitures by 144 UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange from 1985 to 1991 and investigates whether and how accurately investors price the firm's option to abandon assets in exchange for their exit value. Theory prices this real option as an American style put and the...

This paper examines the effect of CEO risk appetite on the return volatility of a sample of large, listed financial firms over the period 2000-2008. After controlling for firm specific characteristics, the results give strong evidence that the CEO risk appetite has an important effect on firm...

This paper develops new financial theory to link the third order stochastic dominance for risk-averse and risk-seeking investors and provide illustration of application in risk management. We present some interesting new properties of third order stochastic dominance (TSD) for risk-averse and...

This paper investigates whether and how political connections influence managerial financial decisions. Our study reveals that those firms that have a politician on its board of directors are highly leveraged, use more long-term debt, hold large excess cash and are associated with low quality...

In this paper we use the Clark (1991) methodology to estimate the macroeconomic financial risk premium from 1985 to 1997 for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, the 6 Latin American countries with the largest stock markets, and test whether and to what extent it affects...

We use the performance of Indian Eurobonds over the period 1990-1992 to examine the sensitivity of India's creditworthiness to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. We also explore the related question of whether the changes in creditworthiness, measured as the effect of changes in...

In this paper we look at the Indian financial crisis of 1990-1992 that included three credit rating downgrades of two notches each in the short space of 9 months. We measure to what extent India's financial difficulties were the result of conditions prevailing on the international capital...