It is widely acknowledged that many financial markets exhibit a considerably greater degree of kurtosis (and sometimes also skewness) than is consistent with the Geometric Brownian Motion model of Black and Scholes (1973). Among the many alternative models that have been proposed in this...

Managed portfolios that take less risk when volatility is high produce large alphas, substantially increase factor Sharpe ratios, and produce large utility gains for mean-variance investors. We document this for the market, value, momentum, profitability, return on equity, and investment factors...

We show that the standard equation-by-equation OLS used in performance evaluation ignores information in the alpha population and leads to severely biased estimates for the alpha population. We propose a new framework that treats fund alphas as random effects. Our framework allows us to make...

Aggregate art price patterns mask a lot of underlying variation--both in the time series and in the cross- section. We argue that, to increase our understanding of the market for aesthetics, it is helpful to take a micro perspective on the formation of art prices, and acknowledge that each...

Asset pricing models such as the conditional CAPM are typically estimated with MLE using a monthly or quarterly horizon with data sampled to match the horizon even though daily data are available. We develop an overlapping data inference methodology (ODIN) that uses all of the data while...

Using a panel of international government bond data, I construct fixed income portfolios that match the duration of the dividend strips of the corresponding local aggregate stock market index. I find that these bond portfolios have performed as well as -- if not better than -- their stock...

Volatility has been one of the most active and successful areas of research in time series econometrics and economic forecasting in recent decades. This chapter provides a selective survey of the most important theoretical developments and empirical insights to emerge from this burgeoning...

What do academics have to offer market risk management practitioners in financial institutions? Current industry practice largely follows one of two extremely restrictive approaches: historical simulation or RiskMetrics. In contrast, we favor flexible methods based on recent developments in...

Most affine models of the term structure with stochastic volatility (SV) predict that the variance of the short rate is simultaneously a linear combination of yields and the quadratic variation of the spot rate. However, we find empirically that the A1(3) SV model generates a time series for the...

We develop a jackknife estimator for the conditional variance of a minimum-tracking- error-variance portfolio constructed using estimated covariances. We empirically evaluate the performance of our estimator using an optimal portfolio of 200 stocks that has the lowest tracking error with respect...