The study analyzes the influence of macroeconomic news announcements on (a) interest rates for commercial mortgages, residential mortgages, 10-year Treasury notes, and Baa-rated corporate bonds; and (b) corresponding mortgage spreads. It is both interesting and highly relevant from a policy and...

This paper posits that the failure of past studies to document a positive relationship between REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) returns and inflation is an artifact of the empirical framework that has predominated in these studies. Applying a pooled estimation methodology to an expansive data...

This paper compares the out-of-sample performance of no-load and load mutual funds. Unlike the pervious literature, this paper provides a more comprehensive analysis as it uses methodologies to incorporate loads directly into the returns, utilizes a large sample of funds free of survivorship...

State lottery prizes are currently independent of all financial markets. If States made these prizes positively correlated with the stock market, financial risk would be transferred to lottery ticket holders. This would allow States to risklessly increase their lottery profits

Sharpe's (1966) portfolio performance ratio, the ratio of the portfolio?s expected return to its standard deviation, is a very well known tool for comparing portfolios. However, due to the presence of random denominators in the definition of the ratio, the sampling distribution of the Sharpe...

This study examines the degree to which the well-known Morningstar rating system is a predictor of out-of-sample mutual fund performance, an important issue given that high-rated funds receive the lion's share of investor cash inflow. We use a data set based on growth mutual funds that is free...

This paper utilizes a new data set from AllianceBernstein that, unlike other corporate governance data, has monthly-updated firm-level governance ratings for 21 emerging markets countries for almost a five year period. With these unique data, we examine how changes in corporate governance...