This paper uses a data set of industry-level equity returns from both developed and emerging markets to investigate whether the quality of the institutional environment recently shown to affect capital markets’ size also affects the expected return on equity. The paper documents that the required rate of return on equity is negatively associated with the enforceability of contracts and the impa...

A comparison technique for random walks on finite graphs is introduced, using the well-known interlacing method. It yields improved return probability bounds. A key feature is the incorporation of parts of the spectrum of the transition matrix other than just the principal eigenvalue. As an application, an upper bound of the expected return probability of a random walk with symmetric transition...

the basic model for valuation of firm is the dividend discount model (ddm). when investors buy stocks, they expect to receive two types of cash flow: dividend in the period during which the stock is owned, and the expected sales price at the end of the period. in the extreme example, the investor keeps the stock until the company is liquidated; in such a case, the liquidating dividend becomes t...

This paper investigates estimating the variance of a temporal-difference learning agent’s update target. Most reinforcement learning methods use an estimate of the value function, which captures how good it is for the agent to be in a particular state and is mathematically expressed as the expected sum of discounted future rewards (called the return). These values can be straightforwardly estim...

The paper considers robust optimization to cope with uncertainty about the stock return process in one period option hedging problems. The robust approach relates portfolio choice to uncertainty, making more cautious hedges when uncertainty is high. We represent uncertainty by a set of plausible expected returns of the underlying stocks and show that for this set the robust problem is a second ...

In this paper, we develop a dynamic investment model maximizing the expected “utility” of excess return relative to a benchmark portfolio. Following the standard setting of continuous time framework for the securities market developed by Merton (1971) and others, we obtain an explicit formula for the optimal portfolio policy for a utility function ofHyperbolic Absolute Risk Aversion (HARA). Unl...

In portfolio optimization problems, the minimum expected investment risk is not always smaller than the expected minimal investment risk. That is, using a well-known approach from operations research, it is possible to derive a strategy that minimizes the expected investment risk, but this strategy does not always result in the best rate of return on assets. Prior to making investment decisions...

This paper shows that unexpected stock returns must be associated with changes in expected future dividends or expected future returns A vector autoregressive method is used to break unexpected stock returns into these two components. In U.S. monthly data in 1927-88, one-third of the variance of unexpected returns is attributed to the variance of changing expected dividends, one-third to the va...

This paper shows that unexpected stock returns must be associated with changes in expected future dividends or expected future returns A vector autoregressive method is used to break unexpected stock returns into these two components. In U.S. monthly data in 1927-88, one-third of the variance of unexpected returns is attributed to the variance of changing expected dividends, one-third to the va...