Using a data set that provides unprecedented details on the stockholders of Swedish listed companies, we analyze whether investors take into account corporate governance when they select stocks. We identify the companies where shareholders’ value is less likely to be maximized by using the...

Do entrepreneurs consider the risk of their business equity when making investment portfolio allocations? Many people compartmentalize different risks and consider them separately, called mental accounting. Alternatively, the risk substitution hypothesis suggests that entrepreneurs would offset...

A quadratic discrete time probabilistic model, for optimal portfolio selection in (re-)insurance is studied. For positive values of underwriting levels, the expected value of the accumulated result is optimized, under constraints on its variance and on annual ROE's. Existence of a unique...

The insurance linked securities (ILS) market is an increasingly important alternative asset class for which risk and return analysis differs from other asset classes. Measures of portfolio risk and return for an ILS portfolio are based on the expected losses and expected excess returns over the...

As the skewed return distribution is a prominent feature in nonlinear portfolio selection problems which involve derivative assets with nonlinear payoff structures, Value-at-Risk (VaR) is particularly suitable to serve as a risk measure in nonlinear portfolio selection. Unfortunately, the...

A discrete time probabilistic model, for optimal equity allocation and portfolio selection, is formulated so as to apply to (at least) reinsurance. In the context of a company with several portfolios (or subsidiaries), representing both liabilities and assets, it is proved that the model has...

Using a data-set that provides unprecedented details on individual investors’ stockholdings, we analyse whether investors take into account corporate governance when they select stocks. After controlling for the supply effect via free float and other firm characteristics, we find that all...

The current subprime crisis has prompted us to look again into the nature of risk at the tail of the distribution. In particular, we investigate the risk contribution of an asset, which has infrequent but huge losses, to a portfolio using two risk measures, namely Value-at-Risk (VaR) and...

We compare expected shortfall with value-at-risk (VaR) in three aspects: estimation errors, decomposition into risk factors, and optimization. We describe the advantages and the disadvantages of expected shortfall over VaR. We show that expected shortfall is easily decomposed and optimized while...