2nd Quarter (2013)

Kent Osband Standard financial stress tests are ad hoc. They offer no guidance on how to select the target stress levels, how to adjust for randomness within crisis, or how to integrate the results with other risk measures. The VarGamma metric introduced by Osband (2013) offers an appealing alternative. It estimates a risk premium for… Read more

Sharon Garyn-Tal and Beni Lauterbach It is sometimes argued that existing methodologies for assessing mutual fund’s performance are unfair, as fund’s return is taken net of expenses and benchmark return is gross of expenses. Examining over 1000 U.S. non-specialized mutual funds in 2001-2009, we find that the abovementioned problem is minute – the net economic… Read more

Jeffrey R. Bohn and Roger M. Stein Prudent credit risk management within a bank requires that a number of agents within the firm communicate, agree and act in a concerted fashion to manage credit risk both at the individual exposure level and at the broader portfolio level. This can be challenging given the nature of… Read more

Jason C. Hsu, Hideaki Kudoh and Toru Yamada Using a global equity dataset that includes emerging markets, we confirm that high-volatility stocks tend to deliver low average returns; this effect is robust to adjustments for country and style factors. We also show that sell-side analysts earnings growth forecasts for high-volatility stocks are more biased. It… Read more

Lawrence E. Harris, Ethan Namvar and Blake Phillips We estimate that the ban on short-selling financial stocks imposed by the SEC in September 2008 led to price inflation of 10-12% in the banned stocks based on a factor-analytic model that extracts common valuation information from the prices of stocks that were not banned. This inflation… Read more