With-profit life insurance contracts are designed with a return smoothing collective savings component sharing the investment risks amongst different generations of policyholders. We analyze the resulting implications from the point of view of a multi-asset mean-variance investor by evaluating...

Predictions of asset returns and volatilities are heavily discussed and analyzed in the finance research literature. In this paper, we compare linear and nonlinear predictions for stock- and bond index returns and their covariance matrix. We show in-sample and out-of-sample prediction accuracy...

In this study we develop a trading strategy that exploits limited investor attention. Trading signals for US S&P 500 stocks are derived from Google Search Volume data, taking a long position if investor attention for the corresponding security was abnormally low in the past week. Our strategy...

In this study, we investigate the determinants of convenience yields across a broad range of commodities. We find that the convenience yields of commodities are exposed to both commodity-specific and systematic factors, but to a different extent. The difference in explanatory power of these...