Although mutual fund performance has been dissected from almost every angle, very little attention has been paid to the connection between the actual active decisions made by management and the subsequent performance outcomes. In this paper we use information on institutional mutual funds to...

We study two different safe haven assets, US government bonds and gold, and examine how the price changes of these assets can be used to infer investor behavior under uncertainty. We find that investors are ambiguity-averse, that is they buy gold when faced with extreme uncertainty about the...

Numerous empirical studies dating back to Ball and Brown (1968) have investigated how markets react to the receipt of new information. However, it is only recently that authors have focussed on differentiating between, and learning from, how investors react to good and bad news. In this paper we...

Gold has been a store of value for centuries and a safe haven for investors in the past decades. However, the increased investment in gold for speculative or hedging purposes has changed the safe haven property. We demonstrate theoretically and empirically that investor behaviour has the...

The solution to the problem of hedging contingent claims by local risk-minimisation has been considered in detail in Follmer and Sondermann (1986), Follmer and Schweizer (1991) and Schweizer (1991). However, given a stochastic process Xt and tau1 tau2, the strategy that is locally...

This article explores nonlinearities in the response of speculators’ trading activity to price changes in live cattle, corn, and lean hog futures markets. Analyzing weekly data from March 4, 1997 to December 27, 2005, we reject linearity in all of these markets. Using smooth transition...

We derive and estimate the optimal disbursement from an infinitely-lived charitable trust with an Epstein-Zin-Weil utility function, given general Markovian returns to wealth. We analyze two special cases: where spending is a power function of last period's wealth and the endowment uses 'payout...

The post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) was first identified over 40 years ago and seems to be as much alive today as it ever was. There have been numerous attempts to explain its continued existence. In this paper we provide evidence to support a new explanation: the PEAD is very much a...

We determine optimal consumption paths under a series of returns scenarios for charitable endowments with distinct tastes over investment risk and inter-temporal substitution. Charities typically prefer smooth consumption paths but are investment-risk tolerant. Using a recursive, Kreps-Porteus...

This paper investigates the sensitivity of asset and portfolio price volatility with respect to the minimum available trading interval that the price is quoted. The objective of the study is to find the theoretical impact of high frequency trading on asset and portfolio volatilities, using a...