In order to shed light on the "black boxʺ of institutional equity investing in a systematic manner, I conducted a broadly based questionnaire which received a large response from German mutual fund companies. The survey asked fund managers for their basic views and practices and for insights...

Given the well-documented effects of public policy on financial markets, one would expect political insiders to be capable of enriching themselves through savvy investing. Consistent with this, two prior studies of stock trades in Congress conclude that members of both the House and Senate...

The benchmark CAPM linearly relates the expected returns on an arbitrary asset, an arbitrary benchmark portfolio, and an arbitrary MV frontier portfolio. The benchmark is not required to be on the frontier and may be non-perfectly correlated with the frontier portfolio. The benchmark CAPM...

Extreme asset price movements appear to be more pronounced recently and have major consequences for an economy's financial stability and monetary policies. This paper investigates the extreme behaviour of equity market returns and quantifies the probabilities of these losses. Taking fourteen...

The forecast evaluation literature has traditionally focused on methods for assessing point-forecasts. However, in the context of risk models, interest centers on more than just a single point of the forecast distribution. For example, value-at-risk (VaR) models which are currently in extremely...

Monetary policy has pursued the concept of inflation targeting. This has been implemented in many countries. Here interest rates are supposed to respond to an inflation gap and output gap. Yet, recently monetary policy, in particular in the US after the subprime and the credit crises, the...

The distinguishing characteristic of the institutional asset management industry is that asset management activities involve a series of delegated processes, linking the “triangle” formed by invested funds, fund owners and fund managers. As a result, contractual structures that seek to align...

Using the Mercer database of Canadian institutional money managers we test for performance persistence in several different large-cap equity mandates. From 1990 to 2008 we find that top-performing funds over the prior four years have no better chance of staying in the top half than of falling...

This paper investigates experimentally the role of emotions in a robust behavioral anomaly, the disposition effect. We manipulate choice and responsibility for subsequent gains and losses, thus influencing the anticipated and experienced emotions at play. Merely experiencing a gain or loss, in...

In recent years many US corporate pension plans have closed and entered their “end-state.” As end-state plans have become more prevalent, their special portfolio management challenges, including asset allocation, have gained attention.Pure immunization with public fixed income assets...