Return and Volatility Spillovers Among the Thematic Indices in India

The article attempts to explore the interlinkages among the Nifty thematic indices and their portfolio implications. First, we examine the return and volatility spillovers among eight Nifty thematic indices, namely Energy, Infrastructure, MNC, PSE, Services Sector, Aditya Birla Group, Mahindra Group and Tata group using the vector autoregressive (VAR (1)) asymmetric BEKK–GARCH model for the period 4 January 2010–28 March 2020. Second, the estimation results are used to calculate and analyse the optimal portfolio weights, hedge ratios and hedging effectiveness. We find significant evidence of return and volatility spillover. Moreover, the spillovers are found to be asymmetric in few cases. The optimal portfolio weight favours the MNC and Services sectors.

Evaluation Period and Agency Problem in Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO)

This article investigates the effect of the performance evaluation period on the long-term investment portfolio choice and the agency problem of outsourced investments. Though investors with the prospect utility are required to raise the portfolio weight on risky assets such as stocks for a long investment horizon, institutional investors and professional fund managers cannot help lowering the portfolio weight on risky assets to minimize the loss and to avoid disappointing clients with a short evaluation period. We find empirical evidence in the Korean capital market that stocks and bonds are indifferent to investors with the prospect utility for an evaluation period with 16 months and the optimal portfolio weight of stocks and bonds is 30% to 70%. Therefore there exists the agency problem between investors (principal) and managers (agent) due to frequent performance evaluations, which is able to explain current excessive investment in fixed income markets of most national pension funds. Our result implies that we need to consider extending the evaluation period of the investment performance to achieve the goal of asset and liability management (ALM) of national long-term funds in this low-interest-rate environment.

Modeling and Forecasting Realized Portfolio Diversification Benefits

For a financial portfolio, we suggest a realized measure of diversification benefits, which is based on intraday high-frequency returns. Our measure quantifies volatility reduction, which could be achieved by including an additional asset in the portfolio. In order to make our approach feasible for investors, we also provide time series modeling of both the realized diversification measure and realized portfolio weight. The performance of our approach is evaluated in-sample and out-of-sample. We find out that our approach is helpful for the purpose of portfolio variance minimization.

Portfolio dynamics under illiquidity

Purpose This paper aims to explore the effects of illiquidity on portfolio weight and return dynamics. Design/methodology/approach Using a novel continuous-time framework, the paper makes two key contributions to the literature on asset pricing and illiquidity. The first is to study the effects of illiquidity on portfolio weight dynamics. The second contribution is to analyze how illiquidity affects the risk/return dynamics of a portfolio. Findings The numerical results highlight that investors should be prepared for potentially large and skewed variations in portfolio weights and can be away from optimal diversification for a long time when adding illiquid assets to a portfolio. Additionally, the paper shows that illiquidity increases portfolio risk. Interestingly, this effect gets more pronounced when the return correlation between the illiquid and liquid asset is low. Thus, there is a correlation effect in the sense that illiquidity costs, as measured by the increase in overall portfolio risk, are inversely related to the return correlation of the assets. Originality/value This is the first paper that highlights that the increase in portfolio risk caused by illiquidity is inversely related to the return correlation between the liquid and illiquid assets. This important economic result contrasts with the widely used argument that the benefit of adding illiquid (alternative) assets to a portfolio is their low correlation with (traditional) traded assets. The results imply that the benefits of adding illiquid assets to a portfolio can be much lower than typically perceived.