Performance fees for portfolio managers are designed to align the managers' goals with those of the investors and to motivate managers to aquire superior information and to make better investment decisions. A part of the literature analyzes performance fees on the basis of market valuation. In...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund's alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

Assessments of investors' risk appetite/aversion stance via indicators often yields results which seem unsatisfactory (see e.g. Illing and Aaron (2005)). Understanding how such indicators work therefore seems essential for further improvements. The present paper seeks to contribute to this...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or home bias, from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the bias to...

On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.

We study the economic sources of stock-bond return comovement and its time variation using a dynamic factor model. We identify the economic factors employing structural and non-structural vector autoregressive models for economic state variables such as interest rates, (expected) inflation,...

Despite a large and growing theoretical literature on flights to safety, there does not appear to exist an empirical characterization of flight-to-safety (FTS) episodes. Using only data on bond and stock returns, we identify and characterize flight to safety episodes for 23 countries. On...

This paper tests the performance of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the Fama-French three-factor and Carhart four-factor models on the Polish market. We use stock level data from April 2001 to January 2014 and find strong evidence for value and momentum effects, but only weak evidence...

The efficient market hypothesis describes an efficient market as one in which investors cannot consistently predict stock returns because prices instantly reflect all the information flowing into the market. However, return predictability has been documented in many markets. This study tests the...