Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The proliferation of the Internet has led to the rapid growth of online brokerage. As the Internet now allows individual investors access to information previously available only to institutional investors, individual investors are profiting in the financial markets through online trading schemes. Rock-bottom fees charged by the online brokers and the changing attitude toward risk of the Internet-literate generation prompt the practitioners to question the validity of the traditional valuation models and statistics-based portfolio formulation strategies. These tactics also induce more dramatic changes in the financial markets. Online trading, however, does involve a high degree of risk, and can cause a profitable portfolio to sour in a matter of minutes. This paper addresses the major challenges of trading stocks on the Internet, and recommends a decision support system for online traders to minimize the potential of risks.

More than two-thirds of member countries of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have experienced one or more banking crises in recent years. The inherent fragility of banks has motivated about 50 percent of the countries in the world to establish deposit insurance schemes. By increasing depositor confidence, deposit insurance has the potential to provide for a more stable banking system. Although deposit insurance increases depositor confidence, it removes depositor discipline. Banks are thus freer to engage in activities that are riskier than would otherwise be the case. Deposit insurance itself, in other words, could be the cause of a crisis. The types of schemes countries have adopted will be assessed as well as the benefits and costs of these schemes in promoting stability in the banking sector.

The stochastic discount factor (SDF) approach to fund performance is a recent innovation in the fund performance literature (). A number of recent studies have used the stochastic discount factor approach to evaluate the performance of managed funds. In this paper, I present an overview of the use of the stochastic discount approach to evaluate the unconditional and conditional performance of the fund. I also discuss estimation issues and provide a brief survey of empirical evidence.

All NYSE-listed stocks were switched from a fractional to a decimal trading system on January 29, 2001 and all NASDAQ stocks followed suit on April 9, 2001. The conversion to decimal trading in the U.S. markets has significantly reduced bid-ask spreads. This decline is primarily due to the drop in market makers’ costs for supplying liquidity. In addition, rounding becomes less salient after the decimalization. The decrease in bid-ask spreads can be ascribed to the decrease in price rounding, when controlling for the changes in trading variables.

In January 1997, the U.S. Treasury began to issue inflation-indexed securities (TIIS). The new Treasury security protects investors from inflation by linking the principal and coupon payments to the Consumer Price Index (CPI). This paper discusses the background of issuing TIIS and reviews their unique characteristics.

The asset pricing models of financial economics describe the prices and expected rates of return of securities based on arbitrage or equilibrium theories. These models are reviewed from an empirical perspective, emphasizing the relationships among the various models.

The basic rules of balancing the expected return on an investment against its contribution to portfolio risk are surveyed. The related concept of Capital Asset Pricing Model asserting that the expected return of an asset must be linearly related to the covariance of its return with the return of the market portfolio if the market is efficient and its statistical tests in terms of Arbitraging Price Theory are also surveyed. The intertemporal generalization and issues of estimation errors and portfolio choice are discussed as well.

Measures for evaluating the performance of a mutual fund or other managed portfolio are interpreted as the difference between the average return of the fund and that of an appropriate benchmark portfolio. Traditional measures use a fixed benchmark to match the average risk of the fund. Conditional performance measures use a dynamic strategy as the benchmark, matching the fund’s risk dynamics. The logic of this approach is explained, the models are described and the empirical evidence is reviewed.

More than two-thirds of member countries of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have experienced one or more banking crises in recent years. The inherent fragility of banks has motivated about 50 percent of the countries in the world to establish deposit insurance schemes. By increasing depositor confidence, deposit insurance has the potential to provide for a more stable banking system. Although deposit insurance increases depositor confidence, it removes depositor discipline. Banks are thus freer to engage in activities that are riskier than would otherwise be the case. Deposit insurance itself, in other words, could be the cause of a crisis. The types of schemes countries have adopted will be assessed as well as the benefits and costs of these schemes in promoting stability in the banking sector.

Conditional asset pricing studies predictability in the returns of financial assets, and the ability of asset pricing models to explain this predictability. The relation between predictability and asset pricing models is explained and the empirical evidence for predictability is summarized. Empirical tests of conditional asset pricing models are then briefly reviewed.