778,763 research outputs found
The Empirical Risk-Return Relation: a factor analysis approach
Financial economists have long been interested in the empirical relation
between the conditional mean and conditional volatility of excess stock
market returns, often referred to as the risk-return relation.
Unfortunately, the body of empirical evidence on the risk-return relation is
mixed and inconclusive. A key criticism of the existing empirical literature
relates to the relatively small amount of conditioning information used to
model the conditional mean and conditional volatility of excess stock market
returns. To the extent that financial market participants have information
not reflected in the chosen conditioning variables, measures of conditional
mean and conditional volatility--and ultimately the risk-return relation
itself--will be misspecified and possibly highly misleading. We consider one
remedy to these problems using the methodology of dynamic factor analysis
for large datasets, whereby a large amount of economic information can be
summarized by a few estimated factors. We find that several estimated
factors contain important information about one-quarter ahead excess returns
and volatility that is not contained in commonly used predictor variables.
Moreover, the factor-augmented specifications we examine predict an unusual
16-20 percent of the one-quarter ahead variation in excess stock market
returns, and exhibit remarkably stable and strongly statistically
significant out-of-sample forecasting power. Finally, in contrast to several
pre-existing studies that rely on a small number of conditioning variables,
we find a positive conditional correlation between risk and return that is
strongly statistically significant, whereas the unconditional correlation is weakly negative and statistically snginficantpredictability, conditioning information, large dimension factor models
Analysis of the conditional mutual information in ballistic and diffusive non-equilibrium steady-states
The conditional mutual information (CMI)
quantifies the amount of correlations shared between and \emph{given}
. It therefore functions as a more general quantifier of bipartite
correlations in multipartite scenarios, playing an important role in the theory
of quantum Markov chains. In this paper we carry out a detailed study on the
behavior of the CMI in non-equilibrium steady-states (NESS) of a quantum chain
placed between two baths at different temperatures. These results are used to
shed light on the mechanisms behind ballistic and diffusive transport regimes
and how they affect correlations between different parts of a chain. We carry
our study for the specific case of a 1D bosonic chain subject to local Lindblad
dissipators at the boundaries. In addition, the chain is also subject to
self-consistent reservoirs at each site, which are used to tune the transport
between ballistic and diffusive. As a result, we find that the CMI is
independent of the chain size in the ballistic regime, but decays
algebraically with in the diffusive case. Finally, we also show how this
scaling can be used to discuss the notion of local thermalization in
non-equilibrium steady-states
Optimum estimation via gradients of partition functions and information measures: a statistical-mechanical perspective
In continuation to a recent work on the statistical--mechanical analysis of
minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimation in Gaussian noise via its relation
to the mutual information (the I-MMSE relation), here we propose a simple and
more direct relationship between optimum estimation and certain information
measures (e.g., the information density and the Fisher information), which can
be viewed as partition functions and hence are amenable to analysis using
statistical--mechanical techniques. The proposed approach has several
advantages, most notably, its applicability to general sources and channels, as
opposed to the I-MMSE relation and its variants which hold only for certain
classes of channels (e.g., additive white Gaussian noise channels). We then
demonstrate the derivation of the conditional mean estimator and the MMSE in a
few examples. Two of these examples turn out to be generalizable to a fairly
wide class of sources and channels. For this class, the proposed approach is
shown to yield an approximate conditional mean estimator and an MMSE formula
that has the flavor of a single-letter expression. We also show how our
approach can easily be generalized to situations of mismatched estimation.Comment: 21 pages; submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
Conditional stochastic dominance tests in dynamic settings
This paper proposes nonparametric consistent tests of conditional stochastic dominance of arbitrary order in a dynamic setting. The novelty of these tests lies in the nonparametric manner of incorporating the information set. The test allows for general forms of unknown serial and mutual dependence between random variables, and has an asymptotic distribution that can be easily approximated by simulation. This method has good finite-sample performance. These tests are applied to determine investment efficiency between US industry portfolios conditional on the dynamics of the market portfolio. The empirical analysis suggests that telecommunications dominates the other sectoral portfolios under risk aversion
Conditional Transformation Models
The ultimate goal of regression analysis is to obtain information about the
conditional distribution of a response given a set of explanatory variables.
This goal is, however, seldom achieved because most established regression
models only estimate the conditional mean as a function of the explanatory
variables and assume that higher moments are not affected by the regressors.
The underlying reason for such a restriction is the assumption of additivity of
signal and noise. We propose to relax this common assumption in the framework
of transformation models. The novel class of semiparametric regression models
proposed herein allows transformation functions to depend on explanatory
variables. These transformation functions are estimated by regularised
optimisation of scoring rules for probabilistic forecasts, e.g. the continuous
ranked probability score. The corresponding estimated conditional distribution
functions are consistent. Conditional transformation models are potentially
useful for describing possible heteroscedasticity, comparing spatially varying
distributions, identifying extreme events, deriving prediction intervals and
selecting variables beyond mean regression effects. An empirical investigation
based on a heteroscedastic varying coefficient simulation model demonstrates
that semiparametric estimation of conditional distribution functions can be
more beneficial than kernel-based non-parametric approaches or parametric
generalised additive models for location, scale and shape
Dynamical interpretation of conditional patterns
While great progress is being made in characterizing the 3-D structure of organized turbulent motions using conditional averaging analysis, there is a lack of theoretical guidance regarding the interpretation and utilization of such information. Questions concerning the significance of the structures, their contributions to various transport properties, and their dynamics cannot be answered without recourse to appropriate dynamical governing equations. One approach which addresses some of these questions uses the conditional fields as initial conditions and calculates their evolution from the Navier-Stokes equations, yielding valuable information about stability, growth, and longevity of the mean structure. To interpret statistical aspects of the structures, a different type of theory which deals with the structures in the context of their contributions to the statistics of the flow is needed. As a first step toward this end, an effort was made to integrate the structural information from the study of organized structures with a suitable statistical theory. This is done by stochastically estimating the two-point conditional averages that appear in the equation for the one-point probability density function, and relating the structures to the conditional stresses. Salient features of the estimates are identified, and the structure of the one-point estimates in channel flow is defined
Testing Conditional Asset Pricing Models: An Emerging Market Perspective
The CAPM as the benchmark asset pricing model generally performs poorly in both developed and emerging markets. We investigate whether allowing the model parameters to vary improves the performance of the CAPM and the Fama-French model. Conditional asset pricing models scaled by conditional variables such as Trading Volume and Dividend Yield generally result in small pricing errors. However, a graphical analysis shows that the predictions of conditional models are generally upward biased. We demonstrate that the bias in prediction may be caused by not accommodating frequent large variation in asset pricing models. In emerging markets, volatile institutional, political and macroeconomic conditions results in thick tails in the return distribution. This is characterized by excess kurtosis. It is found that the unconditional Fama-French model augmented with a cubic market factor performs the best among the competing models. This model is also more parsimonious compared to the conditional Fama-French model in terms of number of parameters.Stochastic discount factor; conditional information; kurtosis; emerging markets
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