As defined contribution (DC) plans have grown and have increasingly become the primary retirement savings vehicle, asset allocators are increasingly interested in incorporating illiquid private assets in these retirement funds to offer participants access to investment portfolios and...

This paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country-specific variation. The empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by Fitch Ratings are...

This paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country-specific variation. The empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by Fitch Ratings are...

Modelling of conditional volatilities and correlations across asset returns is an integral part of portfolio decision making and risk management. Over the past three decades there has been a trend towards increased asset return correlations across markets, a trend which has been accentuated...

In recent years, the international community has been increasing its efforts to reduce the human footprint on air pollution and global warming. Total CO2 emissions are a key component of global emissions, and as such, they are closely monitored by national and supranational entities. This study...

The spillover effects of interconnectedness between financial assets are decomposed into both sources of shocks and whether they amplify or dampen volatility conditions in the target market. We use historical decompositions to rearrange information from a VAR which includes sources, direction...

This paper compares the empirical performance of continuous time models for the dynamics of nine different implied volatility indices. The models include linear, quadratic and nonlinear drift specifications with affine, constant elasticity of variance (CEV) and stochastic elasticity of variance...

Investigating the link between ISO 9000 standards and bilateral exports, this paper contributes to the literature on standardization and international trade. A debate exists as to how ISO 9000 impacts trade. First, it has been argued that ISO 9000 is a "common language" that lowers information...

In this paper we document that realized variation measures constructed from high-frequency returns reveal a large degree of volatility risk in stock and index returns, where we characterize volatility risk by the extent to which forecasting errors in realized volatility are substantive. Even...