Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

Using threshold autoregressive specifications, this paper extends the Enders and Granger (1998) framework for parametric tests of level asymmetry. In particular it develops bootstrap likelihood ratio statistics to test the symmetry null against sign and amplitude asymmetries or a combination of...

One of the most important factors to control for the achievements of investment portfolio returns is risk. If we only think that a 100% positive return is needed to recover a portfolio loss of 50%, we can understand why. With the advent of the exponential growth of technology usage in markets,...

To create their rankings, university-ranking agencies usually combine multiple performance measures into a composite index. However, both rankings and index scores are sensitive to the weights assigned to performance measures. This paper uses a stochastic dominance efficiency methodology to...

Using properties of the cdf of a random variable defined as a saddle-type point of a real valued continuous stochastic process, we derive first-order asymptotic properties of tests for stochastic spanning w.r.t. a stochastic dominance relation. First, we define the concept of Markowitz...

Discrete Fourier transforms (dft's) of fractional processes are studied and an exact representation of the dft is given in terms of the component data. The new representation gives the frequency domain form of the model for a fractional process, and is particularly useful in analyzing the...

This paper examines the effectiveness of using futures contracts as hedging instruments of: (1) alternative models of volatility for estimating conditional variances and covariances; (2) alternative currencies; and (3) alternative maturities of futures contracts. For this purpose, daily data of...

The paper examines the performance of four multivariate volatility models, namely CCC, VARMA-GARCH, DCC and BEKK, for the crude oil spot and futures returns of two major benchmark international crude oil markets, Brent and WTI, to calculate optimal portfolio weights and optimal hedge ratios, and...

We develop and implement methods for determining whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for prospect investors. We formulate a new testing procedure for prospect spanning for two nested portfolio sets based on subsampling and...