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Real estate is an important asset, but as a direct investment subject to several difficulties. Shares of public open end funds or of real estate stock corporations represent a possible way for an investor to avoid these problems. The focus of this paper is the analysis of inflation risk of European real estate securities. An overview of the institutional frameworks regarding these companies is given. The returns of real estate securities in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are examined for the period 1980:1-1998:12. Besides the classical Fama/Schwert-approach, shortfall risk measurements have been used. In this context, transaction costs in particular have been taken into account.
The classical approaches to asset allocation give very different conclusions about how much foreign stocks a US investor should hold. US investors should either allocate a large portion of about 40% to foreign stocks (which is the result of mean/variance optimization and the international CAPM) or they should hold no foreign stocks at all (which is the conclusion of the domestic CAPM and mean/variance spanning tests). There is no way in between.
The idea of the Bayesian approach discussed in this article is to shrink the mean/variance efficient portfolio towards the market portfolio. The shrinkage effect is determined by the investor's prior belief in the efficiency of the market portfolio and by the degree of violation of the CAPM in the sample. Interestingly, this Bayesian approach leads to the same implications for asset allocation as the mean-variance/tracking error criterion. In both cases, the optimal portfolio is a combination of the market portfolio and the mean/variance efficient portfolio with the highest Sharpe ratio.
Applying both approaches to the subject of international diversification, we find that a substantial home bias is only justified when a US investor has a strong belief in the global mean/variance efficiency of the US market portfolio and when he has a high regret aversion of falling behind the US market portfolio. We also find that the current level of home bias can be justified whenever-regret aversion is significantly higher than risk aversion.
Finally, we compare the Bayesian approach of shrinking the mean/variance efficient portfolio towards the market portfolio to another Bayesian approach which shrinks the mean/variance efficient portfolio towards the minimum-variance portfolio. An empirical out-of-sample study shows that both Bayesian approaches lead to a clearly superior performance compared to the classical mean/variance efficient portfolio.
The present paper seeks to study the possible diversification potential by the integration of indirect real estate investments in international portfolios. To this end, monthly index-return time-series in the time-period from January 1985 till December 1998 from real estate investment companies as well as common stocks and bonds in Germany, France, Switzerland, Great Britain and the USA were used. We utilize, due to the critical normal distribution assumption, a mean/lower-partial-moment framework. In order to take into account the influence of the currency risk for international investments the analyses have been undertaken both with as well as without hedging the currency risk. We take the viewpoint of a German as well as that of a US-investor to gain insight into the dependency of the diversification potential on the reference currency of the investor.
Rating agencies state that they take a rating action only when it is unlikely to be reversed shortly afterwards. Based on a formal representation of the rating process, I show that such a policy provides a good explanation for the puzzling empirical evidence: Rating changes occur relatively seldom, exhibit serial dependence, and lag changes in the issuers’ default risk. In terms of informational losses, avoiding rating reversals can be more harmful than monitoring credit quality only twice per year.
Evaluating the quality of credit portfolio risk models is an important question for both banks and regulators. Lopez and Saidenberg (2000) suggest cross-sectional resampling techniques in order to make efficient use of available data and to produce measures of forecast accuracy. We first show that their proposal disregards crosssectional dependence in simulated subportfolios, which renders standard statistical inference invalid. We proceed by suggesting another evaluation methodology which draws on the concept of likelihood ratio tests. Specifically, we compare the predictive quality of alternative models by comparing the probabilities that observed data have been generated by these models. The distribution of the test statistic can be derived through Monte Carlo simulation. To exploit differences in cross-sectional predictions of alternative models, the test can be based on a linear combination of subportfolio statistics. In the construction of the test, the weight of a subportfolio depends on the difference in the loss distributions which alternative models predict for this particular portfolio. This makes efficient use of the data, and reduces computational burden. Monte Carlo simulations suggest that the power of the tests is satisfactory.
JEL classification: G2; G28; C52
Evaluating the quality of credit portfolio risk models is an important issue for both banks and regulators. Lopez and Saidenberg (2000) suggest cross-sectional resampling techniques in order to make efficient use of available data. We show that their proposal disregards cross-sectional dependence in resampled portfolios, which renders standard statistical inference invalid. We proceed by suggesting the Berkowitz (1999) procedure, which relies on standard likelihood ratio tests performed on transformed default data. We simulate the power of this approach in various settings including one in which the test is extended to incorporate cross-sectional information. To compare the predictive ability of alternative models, we propose to use either Bonferroni bounds or the likelihood-ratio of the two models. Monte Carlo simulations show that a default history of ten years can be sufficient to resolve uncertainties currently present in credit risk modeling.
Stocks are exposed to the risk of sudden downward jumps. Additionally, a crash in one stock (or index) can increase the risk of crashes in other stocks (or indices). Our paper explicitly takes this contagion risk into account and studies its impact on the portfolio decision of a CRRA investor both in complete and in incomplete market settings. We find that the investor significantly adjusts his portfolio when contagion is more likely to occur. Capturing the time dimension of contagion, i.e. the time span between jumps in two stocks or stock indices, is thus of first-order importance when analyzing portfolio decisions. Investors ignoring contagion completely or accounting for contagion while ignoring its time dimension suffer large and economically significant utility losses. These losses are larger in complete than in incomplete markets, and the investor might be better off if he does not trade derivatives. Furthermore, we emphasize that the risk of contagion has a crucial impact on investors' security demands, since it reduces their ability to diversify their portfolios.
Retirees confront the difficult problem of how to manage their money in retirement so as to not outlive their funds while continuing to invest in capital markets. We posit a dynamic utility maximizer who makes both asset location and allocation decisions when managing her retirement financial wealth and annuities, and we prove that she can benefit from both the equity premium and longevity insurance in her retirement portfolio. Even without bequests, she will not fully annuitize; rather, her optimal stock allocation amounts initially to more than half of her financial wealth and declines with age. Welfare gains from this strategy can amount to 40 percent of financial wealth (depending on risk parameters and other resources). In practice, it turns out that many retirees will do almost as well by purchasing a variable annuity invested 60/40 in stocks/bonds. JEL Classification: G11, G23, G22, D14, J26, H55
We compute the optimal dynamic asset allocation policy for a retiree with Epstein-Zin utility. The retiree can decide how much he consumes and how much he invests in stocks, bonds, and annuities. Pricing the annuities we account for asymmetric mortality beliefs and administration expenses. We show that the retiree does not purchase annuities only once but rather several times during retirement (gradual annuitization). We analyze the case in which the retiree is restricted to buy annuities only once and has to perform a (complete or partial) switching strategy. This restriction reduces both the utility and the demand for annuities.
We propose a new decision criterion under risk in which people extract both utility from anticipatory feelings ex ante and disutility from disappointment ex post. The decision maker chooses his degree of optimism, given that more optimism raises both the utility of ex ante feelings and the risk of disappointment ex post. We characterize the optimal beliefs and the preferences under risk generated by this mental process and apply this criterion to a simple portfolio choice/insurance problem. We show that these preferences are consistent with the preference reversal in the Allais’ paradoxes and predict that the decision maker takes on less risk compared to an expected utility maximizer. This speaks to the equity premium puzzle and to the preference for low deductibles in insurance contracts. Keywords: endogenous beliefs, anticipatory feeling, disappointment, optimism, decision under risk, portfolio allocation.