Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

This Paper analyses the effects of residential property holdings on optimal investment portfolios. Using a mean-variance framework, we show that residential real estate offers significant diversification benefits relative to investments in stocks and bonds for US investors. Risk averse investors...

We use a simple model in which the expected returns in emerging markets depend on their systematic risk as measured by their beta relative to the world portfolio as well as on the level of integration in that market. The level of integration is a time-varying variable that depends on the market...

In this paper, the authors develop a test for the hypothesis that a series (observed in discrete time) is generated by a diffusion process. This test is based on an overidentifying relation between variance and kurtosis parameters that holds for GARCH diffusions. The proposed test is not...

We compare the forecast accuracy of autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models based on data observed with high and low frequency, respectively. We discuss how, for instance, a quarterly model can be used or predict one quarter ahead even if only annual data are available, and we...

We reconsider the signal-extraction approach to measuring premia in the pricing of forward foreign exchange, put forward by Wolff, in which the difference between the forward rate and the associated future spot rate is modeled as an autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model for the risk premium...

The authors derive low frequency, say weekly, models implied by high frequency, say daily, ARMA models with symmetric GARCH errors. They show that low frequency models exhibit conditional heteroskedasticity of the GARCH form as well. The parameters in the conditional variance equation of the low...

We investigate, from a portfolio performance perspective, the relative importance of country and industry factors as determinants of international equity returns in the Euro-zone over the 1990 to 2003 period. Although industry- and country-based portfolios are indistinguishable in terms of...

We analyze the performance persistence in hedge funds taking into account look-ahead bias (multi-period sampling bias). We model liquidation of hedge funds by analyzing how it depends upon historical performance. Next, we use a weighting procedure that eliminates look-ahead bias in measures for...