This study analyzes the effect of corporate bond rating changes over stock prices. We explore the effects over excess of returns and systematic risk. Rating changes by Moody´s, Standard and Poor´sor FitchIBCA are analyzed. On an efficient market, these changes will omly have some effect if...

This paper examines the effectiveness of using futures contracts as hedging instruments of: (1) alternative models of volatility for estimating conditional variances and covariances; (2) alternative currencies; and (3) alternative maturities of futures contracts. For this purpose, daily data of...

In the past decades, numerous studies have been conducted on the trade-off between guns and butter, namely defense versus social sector expenditure. The aim of this research is identifying whether indeed defense spending crowded out investment and other social expenditures as health and...

The Basel III Accord requires that banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) communicate their daily risk forecasts to the appropriate monetary authorities at the beginning of each trading day, using one of a range of alternative risk models to forecast Value-at-Risk (VaR)....

The Basel II Accord requires that banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) communicate their daily risk forecasts to the appropriate monetary authorities at the beginning of each trading day, using one or more risk models to measure Value-at-Risk (VaR). The risk estimates of...

This paper examines the effectiveness of using futures contracts as hedging instruments of: (1) alternative models of volatility for estimating conditional variances and covariances; (2) alternative currencies; and (3) alternative maturities of futures contracts. For this purpose, daily data of...

Volatility is an indispensible component of sensible portfolio risk management. The volatility of an asset of composite index can be traded by using volatility derivatives, such as volatility and variance swaps, options and futures. The most popular volatility index is VIX, which is a key...

This paper features an analysis of the e_ectiveness of a range of portfolio diversification strategies as applied to a set of 17 years of monthly hedge fund index returns on a set of ten market indices representing 13 major hedge fund categories, as compiled by the EDHEC Risk Institute. The...

One of the fastest growing areas in empirical finance, and also one of the least rigorously analyzed, especially from a financial econometrics perspective, is the econometric analysis of financial derivatives, which are typically complicated and difficult to analyze. The purpose of this special...

It is common practice to evaluate fixed-event forecast revisions in macroeconomics by regressing current forecast revisions on one-period lagged forecast revisions. Under weak-form (forecast) efficiency, the correlation between the current and one-period lagged revisions should be zero. The...