This study examines gold’s contribution to portfolio risk over different time scales. The analysis is based on wavelet decompositions of the variances and covariances associated with a portfolio that includes gold, stocks, 10-year government bonds and three-month Treasury bills. The results...

This study investigates the long-memory property and the fractionally cointegration between absolute changes in observed stock prices and implied stock prices from option pricing model. We find a stylized fact that absolute price movements in stock and option markets are characterized by long...

In economic theory, both discrete and continuous time models are commonly believed to be equivalent in the sense that one can always be used to approximate the other, or equivalently, any phenomena present in one is also present in the other. This common belief is misguided. Both (strict) local...

This paper exploits a natural experiment (the Wenchuan Earthquake in China) to study the effects of investor sentiment on stock returns. We find that during the 12months following the earthquake, stock returns are significantly lower for firms headquartered nearer the epicenter than for firms...

This paper shows that the standard textbook formula for computing the present value of a future random cash flow – the discounted expected value – is formally incorrect and can generate significant errors when used to compute present values. The correct present value method is provided as...

As recent research highlights that the Sharpe ratio has a decision theoretic foundation even in the case of asymmetric or fat-tailed excess returns and thus is adequate even for the evaluation of hedge funds, this note provides the first Sharpe ratio based performance analysis of the hedge fund...

We build a dataset of the industrial composition of the stock market and the economy for 26 countries. This composition is far from representative of that of the economy, particularly in less-developed markets. Based on this, we build a measure of scarcity of investable securities and show that...

The hedge and safe haven properties of gold in advanced economies’ financial markets are well documented in the literature. Studies of how this issue relates to emerging markets and developing countries are, however, very limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by empirically analyzing the...

This paper extends the existing literature on managing house price risk. While previous work finds that a hedger would have reduced a large amount of variance in housing returns in Las Vegas, Nevada using Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) futures contracts, we show that neither static nor...

We study the optimal insurance demand in the μ,σ space when the decision-maker faces a first-order risk increase. In particular, we investigate the effect of an increase in the expected damage when the variance is held constant. An unambiguous result is derived on insurance demand that differs...