This paper investigates the reasons for the lack of long-term persistence in the investment performance of actively managed equity mutual funds. We document that the responses of investors, fund managers, and investment management companies to past performance have an important impact on future...

The past few decades have seen amajor shift from centralized to decentralized investment management by pension fund sponsors, despite the increased coordination problems that this brings. Using a unique, proprietary dataset of pension sponsors and managers, we identify two secular...

The recent crisis highlighted, once again, the importance of early warning models to assess the soundness of individual banks. In the present study, we use six quantitative techniques originating from various disciplines to classify banks in three groups. The first group includes very strong and...

We estimate a model of holding period adjustment for four stock indices in the UK over the period 1980 to 2004. We postulate zone-symmetric investor preferences that result in an estimable ESTAR (Exponential Smooth Transition Autoregressive) model of the holding period for common stocks as a...

Using a Markov switching unobserved component model we decompose the term premium of the North American CDX investment grade index (CDX-IG) into a permanent and a stationary component. We explain the evolution of the two components in relating them to monetary policy and stock market variables....

This paper addresses the impact of developments in the credit risk transfer market on the viability of a group of systemically important financial institutions. We propose a bank default risk model, in the vein of the classic Merton-type, which utilizes a multi-equation framework to model...

This study examines the patterns of, and long-run returns to, directors’ (insiders’) trades along the value-glamour continuum in all stocks listed on the main London Stock Exchange and analyses what these directors’ trades add to a naïve value-glamour strategy. We consider alternative...

This paper investigates the presence of abnormal returns through the use of trading strategies that exploit the predictability of short run stock price movements. Based on historical returns of the largest set of individual securities in the UK stock market examined to date, this paper...

This paper examines the performance of personal pensions (exempt unit trusts) in the UK 1980-2000. Unitised personal pension schemes are a type of mutual fund that is constituted as a contractual savings scheme, whose value can only be accessed at retirement. By studying the performance of these...

Various markets, particularly NASDAQ, have been under pressure from regulators and market participants to introduce call auctions for their opening and closing periods. We investigate the performance of call markets at the open and close from a unique natural experiment provided by the...