Annals of Financial Economics

This study aims to find the impact of change in economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the returns and volatilities of 11 CRSP Ziman value-weighted US real estate investment trusts (REITs) during 1985–2016. The results indicate that the change in EPU has a positive relationship with volatility and a negative one with the REITs returns. Among EPU components, news-based component has the major impact than the others. Change in economic policy uncertainty has a significant impact on the returns of all the indices except hybrid, healthcare and unclassified REITs after controlling for macroeconomic variables. Whereas, the volatility is mainly explained by its own past values and macroeconomic variables.

The return and risk of dollar-cost averaging (DCA) and self-annuitization (SA) investing are compared with the underlying return in this paper. The underlying return, which is assumed to be normally distributed, is generated by Monte Carlo simulations under six market scenarios including upward and mean reverting markets across several investment horizons. Owing to the multiple cash flows of DCA and SA, the annual internal rate of return is used to measure the DCA and SA returns. The results show that the mean return of DCA is slightly higher than the underlying return, while the SA is lower, particularly under short investment horizons. Both DCA and SA produce higher return volatility and riskiness than the underlying return. They also create negative skewness and excess kurtosis for the return distributions. For comparing their performances, we use the economic performance measure which can consider those high moments of distribution. Except for the mean reverting market, the underlying return is the best performer, while SA is the worst. This evidence becomes even clearer and convincing as the investment horizon increases. DCA can have lower riskiness and perform better only under the mean reverting market.

I use five separate measures of deviation from Put-Call Parity of options on a stock without splits or dividends as separate negative measures for market efficiency. I rely upon the theory of trading volume as a function of short sales costs, etc., and that of market efficiency as a function of trading volume, etc. derived by Bhattacharya (2019). I use Three-Stage Least Squares (3SLS) to estimate this structural system, separately for Nasdaq and non-Nasdaq U.S. stocks. I find, contrary to much previous theoretical and empirical work, that the impact of short sales costs & constraints on market efficiency is not significantly negative and that the impact of trading volume on market efficiency is not significantly positive, and my results are robust to various econometric specifications and financial economic assumptions.

This paper proposes swaps on two important new measures of generalized variance, namely the maximum eigenvalue and trace of the covariance matrix of the assets involved. We price these generalized variance swaps for financial markets with Markov-modulated volatilities. We consider multiple assets in the portfolio for theoretical purpose and demonstrate our approach with numerical examples taking three stocks in the portfolio. The results obtained in this paper have important implications for the commodity sector where such swaps would be useful for hedging risk.

The debate on the impact of business climate on private investment is still ongoing today. This paper contributes to the existing literature by examining the impact of a wide range of dimensions of the business climate on domestic investment and foreign direct investment in a sample of Middle East and North African economies between 2000 and 2015. Findings of the paper add new evidence and shed interesting insights into the debate. While almost all areas matter for domestic and foreign investors, the common and most important dimensions for both of them are regulations, macroeconomic management and infrastructure. Moreover, the control of corruption and labor market regulation are found to exert opposite effects on domestic investment and foreign direct investment. We conclude that setting up a good business climate is an overall process that should touch simultaneously and gradually all dimensions.

In this paper, we provide an alternative framework for constructing an arbitrage-free European-style option surface. The main motivation for our work is that such a construction has rarely been achieved in the literature so far. The novelty of our approach is that we perform the calibration and interpolation in the put option space. To demonstrate the applicability of our technique, we extract the model-free implied volatility from S&P 500 index options. Subsequently, we compare its information content to that of the CBOE VIX index. Our empirical tests indicate that information content of the option-implied volatility values based on our method are superior to the VIX index.

In this study, we forecast the realized volatility of the CSI 300 index using the heterogeneous autoregressive model for realized volatility (HAR-RV) and its various extensions. Our models take into account the time-varying property of the models’ parameters and the volatility of realized volatility. The adjusted dynamic model averaging (ADMA) approach, is used to combine the forecasts of the individual models. Our empirical results suggest that ADMA can generate more accurate forecasts than DMA method and alternative strategies. Models that use time-varying parameters have greater forecasting accuracy than models that use the constant coefficients.