Abstract Islamic assets, assets compliant with ethical and religious norms as codified in Sharia law, broaden the investor base. Do such investments contribute to mean-variance efficiency, if so, how? Using daily data on stock, bond, money market indices from nine countries 37 non-Islamic ones May 2007 June 2010, we show that adding an existing portfolio of conventional (non-Islamic) can expand...

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that investors’ behavior is not well described by the traditional paradigm of (subjective) expected utility maximization under rational expectations. A literature has arisen that models agents whose choices are consistent with models that are less restrictive than the standard subjective expected utility framework. In this paper we conduct a survey ...

This paper analyzes the relationship between international financial integration and economic growth. Recent literature, surveyed in this paper, emphasizes the role of financial deepening on economic growth. Less attention has been paid, however, to the role of international financial integration in promoting a deep domestic financial market and through that channel fostering economic growth. F...

Why is investment in human and physical capital in Latin America lower than in the faster growing economies of East Asia? Is this phenomenon and Latin America’s generally higher income inequality an important consequence of the input requirements and price variability of the regions’ products. To help answer these questions, this paper explores a Heckscher-Ohlin linear program incorporating rea...

The growing awareness fhat different national equity markets often perform very differenfly in any given period has led to increased investor interest in international diversification of investment portfolios. It appears that at least for fhe U.S., however, fhis interest has not been translated intt> much actual foreign portfolio investment. One reason tor this may be the relative novelty of to...

This paper examines optimal international portfolio choice when equity market linkages increase during periods of distress and investors are averse to disappointing outcomes. I propose a model that captures the joint effect of these two phenomena and show that it leads to a first-order effect on the optimal portfolios. Even during correlated downturns, international diversification is still hig...

Extreme losses of portfolios with heavy-tailed components are studied in the framework of multivariate regular variation. Asymptotic distributions of extreme portfolio losses are characterized by a functional γξ = γξ(Ψ, α) of the tail index α, the spectral measure Ψ, and the vector ξ of portfolio weights. Existence, uniqueness, and location of the optimal portfolio are analysed and applied to t...

We propose a method for mutual fund performance measurement and best-practice benchmarking, which endogenously identifies a dominating benchmark portfolio for each evaluated mutual fund. Dominating benchmarks provide information about efficiency improvement potential as well as portfolio strategies for achieving them. Portfolio diversification possibilities are accounts for by using Data Envelo...

The principles of Markowitz’s portfolio construction model, which requires explicit risk and expected return assumptions, are widely accepted. In practice, however, the most widely used portfolio construction techniques—market-cap weighting and its main rival, fundamental weighting—make no explicit assumptions about these very same risk and return parameters. The most recent departures from mar...