Institutional funds have concentrated ownership by a few institutional investors, infrequent outflows and essentially no leverage. Yet using unique granular data on the bond holdings of institutional funds, we show that their trading behavior is strongly procyclical: they actively move into...

We use unique institutional securities holdings data to examine the trading behaviour of delegated institutional capital and its impact on bond risk premia. We show that institutional fund managers trade strongly procyclically: they actively move into higher yielding, longer duration and lower...

The aim of financial institutions and regulators is to find an effective way to measure the risk profile of different segments of investors. Both economists and psychologists developed several methodologies to elicit and assess individual risk attitude, but these are not perfect and show several...

This paper studies the optimal consumption and portfolio problem of an investor with recursive preferences who is subject to time-varying margin requirements. The level of the requirements at each moment is determined by contemporaneous volatility of returns, which is stochastic and may have...

Do fundamental index funds beat traditional ones? The major companies that offer the new fundamentally indexed international mutual funds are Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), Research Affiliates, and WisdomTree. A major provider of traditional international index funds is DFA. We compare various...

Although private credit funds have rapidly grown into a standalone asset class over the last decade, little is known about the aggregate performance of these funds. To provide a first look at absolute and relative performance, we utilize the Burgiss database of 476 private credit funds with...

This paper empirically decomposes hedge fund excess return into factor timing, security selection, and risk premium using Lo (2008)'s performance measure. Portfolio-level tests show that security selection explains most of the excess return generated by hedge funds during 1994-2009, and the...

Do enhanced index funds beat traditional ones? The major companies that offer the new enhanced index international mutual funds are Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), RAFI, and WisdomTree. A major provider of traditional international index funds is DFA. We compare various enhanced international...

We investigate the case for Bordeaux and Rhone wine as an investment. The raw data analysed comprises of approx. 335,000 observations of wine sales prices and is analysed using the repeat sales regression method. General Red Bordeaux and Rhone wine indices are constructed for the period January...

We study empirical mean-variance optimization when the portfolio weights are restricted to be direct functions of underlying stock characteristics such as value and momentum. The closed-form solution to the portfolio weights estimator shows that the portfolio problem in this case reduces to a...