What motivates investors to hold American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) rather than the underlying stock of U.S. listed foreign firms? We analyze the investment allocation decision of actively-managed emerging market mutual fund managers. Although legal provisions are typically assumed to affect ADR and its underlying domestic shares equally, investors holding ADRs may have a higher level of legal...

In a finite time horizon, incomplete market, continuous-time setting with dividends and investor incomes governed by arithmetic Brownian motions, we derive closed-form solutions for the equilibrium risk-free rate and stock price for an economy with finitely many heterogeneous CARA investors and unspanned income risk. In equilibrium, the Sharpe ratio is the same as in an otherwise identical comp...

We study portfolio allocation and characterize contracts issued by firms in the international financial market when investors exhibit ambiguity aversion and perceive ambiguity in assets issued in foreign locations. Increases in the variance of their risky production process cause firms to issue assets with a higher variable payment (equity). Hikes in investors’ perceived ambiguity have the oppo...

The standard real–options model predicts that increased uncertainty discourages investment. When projects are large and take time to build, however, that prediction can be reversed. We investigate the investment/uncertainty relationship empirically using historical data on opening dates of new U.S. copper mines — large, irreversible projects with substantial construction lags. Both the timing o...

In this article we have reviewed ``Modern Portfolio Analysis'' and outlined some important topics for further research. Issues discussed include the history and future of portfolio theory, the key inputs necessary to perform portfolio optimization, speci®c problems in applying portfolio theory to ®nancial institutions, and the methods for evaluating how well portfolios are managed. Emphasis is ...

We consider financial contracts that are tradable in any quantities at fixed prices. A bundle of such contracts constitutes an arbitrage if it offers non-negative payoff in any future state, but commands negative present cost. This article brings together fairly recent results on how to find an arbitrage provided some exists. Otherwise, a state-contingent, non-profit price vector will be identi...

Using a calibrated OLG model with several sources of uncertainty we find that the impact of ageing and of reform of social security upon the demand for housing and the level of owner occupation is substantial. The overall structure of household asset holdings in particular the split between real and financial assets is sensitive to demographics and to the generosity of state run, pay-as-yougo p...

We generalise the Black-Litterman (BL) portfolio management framework to incorporate time-variation in the conditional distribution of returns in the asset allocation process. We evaluate the performance of the dynamic BL model using both standard performance ratios as well as other measures that are designed to capture tail risk in the presence of non-normally distributed asset returns. We fin...

This paper develops a model of information acquisition and portfolio choice under short-sale constraints. We show that short-sale constraints reduce information acquisition and both the constraints on short-selling and the reduced information acquisition affect investment decisions. The effects of short-sale constraints on investment decisions and asset prices are driven largely by the effects ...

Despite the size and importance of separately managed accounts (SMAs) and collective investment trusts, their characteristics and performance have not been studied in detail. We show that separate account performance is similar to that of index funds and superior to that of actively managed mutual funds. Management supplies a benchmark for each separate account. When the management-selected ben...