bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Assessing Risk Tolerance
Authors: Hanna Sherman D. , Guillemette Michael A. , Finke Michael S. 
Published: May 2013

AbstractAssessing risk tolerance is an important part of advising clients about portfolio selections. The expected utility approach underlying portfolio advice based on financial economics assumes that a household has some level of risk aversion that determines its utility from different wealth or consumption levels. Therefore, a household's risk aversion or its inverse—risk tolerance—is a key factor in determining the optimal portfolio for a household. Risk tolerance measures that offer choices without context as to how potential consumption would change do not provide estimates that measure the concept of risk aversion assumed in standard expected utility analyses of portfolio choices. Behavioral finance approaches, including prospect theory, may better explain household investment choices, but a consensus does not exist in regard to how to incorporate these approaches into rigorous portfolio recommendations. Risk capacity, based on human wealth and the investment horizon, is also crucial in determining optimal portfolio advice. This chapter provides a discussion of methods for estimating risk tolerance and the limitations of alternative measures.
Private Wealth Management
Authors: Preece Dianna C. 
Published: May 2013

AbstractPrivate wealth management is a specialized field focused on investment management for high-net-worth individuals and families. The process is complex and must be customized to the individual. Historically, an assumption that investors were risk averse resulted in forecasts based on rational expectations with assets considered in a portfolio context. Increasingly accepted behavioral models indicate that investors do not necessarily follow the tenets of modern portfolio theory but instead exhibit loss aversion, have biased expectations, and do not integrate assets. Individual financial circumstances are unique and constructing an investment policy statement (IPS) is a critical step in understanding the investor's goals. Risk tolerance and return objectives are specified in the IPS, along with constraints that are relevant to the individual's portfolio. Liquidity needs and taxation are especially important. The portfolio asset allocation is a function of risk and return objectives and the investor's constraints. Retirement planning and estate planning are also part of the process.
Institutional Wealth Management
Authors: Robbins Eric J. 
Published: May 2013

Abstract
An institutional investment policy statement (IIPS) is a formal document designed to help guide the investment process. Although this document is not currently required by regulation, it is a useful tool in managing a pool of assets in the best interests of the beneficiaries. In the volatility of modern markets, letting emotions and short-term trends dictate an investment strategy can easily happen. The IIPS is designed to help mitigate this natural tendency and instead focus on long-term goals. The primary factors considered in creating an IIPS are objectives, risk tolerance, and unique constraints. Each type of institutional investor (e.g., pension plans, insurance companies, endowments, foundations, and banks) will have a different blend of needs within this framework and will require a customized plan for investing.
The Role of Asset Allocation in the Investment Decision-Making Process
Authors: Farrell James L. 
Published: May 2013

Abstract
This chapter focuses on asset allocation, which is an important aspect in the investment decision-making process. Asset allocation has the potential to add the most to longer-term performance, if executed properly, or detract greatly, if done poorly. Strategic asset allocation (SAA) takes a longer-term approach. One approach to SAA, called the historic approach, is to simply extrapolate the risk and return of asset classes experienced over, for example, the last 80 years into the future. Over such a long period, the economy experiences many different economic episodes. An alternative is the scenario approach that forecasts over a shorter, three-to-five-year period and allows for accommodating such episodes. The scenario approach also requires greater skill and analysis to execute than the historic approach. Tactical asset allocation (TAA) is a complementary approach and takes a much shorter-time horizon of, for example, one to three years. TAA has potential to add value by taking advantage of shorter-term opportunities. At the same time, this approach presents greater risk, which the portfolio manager or investor needs to consider. Other topics examined include risk premium valuation, stock-bond correlation, investor expectations, economic and technical indicators, cyclical markets, and secular trends.
Portfolio Construction with Downside Risk
Authors: Lohre Harald , Neumann Thorsten , Winterfeldt Thomas 
Published: May 2013

Abstract
Portfolio construction seeks an optimal tradeoff between a portfolio's mean return and its associated risk. Since risk may not be properly described by return volatility, portfolios are optimized in this chapter with respect to various measures of downside risk in an empirical out-of-sample setting. These optimizations are successful for most of the investigated measures when assuming perfect foresight of expected returns. Moreover, some of these findings continue to hold when using more naïve return estimates. The reductions in downside risk are most convincing for semivariance, semideviation, and conditional value at risk (VaR) while VaR and skewness appear useless for portfolio construction purposes.
Asset Allocation with Downside Risk Management
Authors: Davis Joshua M. , Page Sébastien 
Published: May 2013

AbstractThe 2007 to 2008 financial crisis has sparked a renewed skepticism of portfolio theory and financial engineering. As a result, key changes are taking place in how investors manage risk from the top down. Asset allocators have become increasingly aware of the pitfalls of a naïve approach to portfolio engineering that relies on the normal distribution and that fails to address downside risk. Additionally, asset classes are no longer the optimal way to look at diversification; instead, risk factor diversification is becoming the focus. This chapter focuses on these key changes. It presents the theoretical foundations behind the risk factor approach to asset allocation, demonstrates how risk concentration leads to tail risk, and analyzes the costs and benefits of tail risk hedging in practice.
Alternative Investments
Authors: Hass Lars Helge , Schweizer Denis , Proelss Juliane 
Published: May 2013

AbstractMonthly return distributions of alternative assets are generally not normally distributed and typically show significantly smoothed returns, which can lead to an underestimation of risk. Furthermore, portfolio optimization in the mean-variance framework that includes alternative assets is suboptimal. This is because the variance of the return distributions for these investments fails to adequately capture all risks. This chapter provides an estimate of the efficient frontier for portfolios consisting of numerous alternative assets as well as traditional asset classes such as equities and bonds. This process enables incorporating the special characteristics of alternative investments, especially downside risk, in the optimization procedure for mixed-asset portfolios. Within this approach, mixed-asset portfolios containing the majority of alternative investments can be used to illustrate the previously unknown effects of skewness and excess kurtosis on the efficient frontier. The evidence shows that alternative investments are ideally suited to reduce portfolio risk and enhance risk-adjusted performance.
Trading Strategies, Portfolio Monitoring, and Rebalancing
Authors: Cesari Riccardo , Marzo Massimiliano 
Published: May 2013

AbstractTrading strategies translate goals and constraints of asset management into dynamic, intertemporal, and coherent portfolio decisions. Under special assumptions, myopic portfolio policies are shown to be optimal and constant over time. In general, however, both optimal theoretical portfolios and current portfolio positions are subject to random movements so that periodic monitoring and rebalancing are necessary. Transaction and monitoring costs create a tradeoff between the cost of not being at the optimal allocation (tracking error) and the cost of swapping the current portfolio for the optimal one. Optimal rebalancing results in the replacement of the optimal allocation with a no-trade region delimited by rebalance boundaries. The factors influencing the boundaries and the rebalancing decisions can be analytically and numerically explained. Popular rebalancing rules imply a substantial amount of excess trading costs, but they can generate positive net returns in the case of mean-reverting market regimes.
Benchmarking
Authors: Lioui Abraham , Poncet Patrice 
Published: May 2013

AbstractBenchmarking, the practice of designing a given portfolio or index as a reference for the portfolio adopted by the fund manager, serves two main purposes. First, benchmarking is an asset allocation tool for delegated portfolio management. Second, benchmarking is a tool for measuring the portfolio manager's performance and compensating her accordingly. The practice of benchmarking is booming in the delegated portfolio management industry. As an asset allocation tool, benchmarking is a reference to be followed by the manager in a more or less strict manner. As a tool for measuring relative performance, benchmarking helps in assessing the manager's skills as to market timing and/or security selection and allows for meaningful definitions of tracking error and the information ratio. The closely related issues of principal-agent contracting, compensation schemes and implicit incentives, and optimal benchmarking are discussed at length. The evolution in the design of appropriate benchmarks is also analyzed.
Use of Derivatives
Authors: Leblanc Matthieu 
Published: May 2013

AbstractDerivatives are an ancient commercial practice. In the financial world, these products have become essential tools for any professional investor. Asset managers use them in their investment processes to take advantage of leverage, reactivity, hedging, and low transaction costs. However, the features of these instruments require technical expertise that is not always part of the managers' background. Investors often fear derivatives because they are poorly understood and sometimes misused. This chapter provides the prerequisites for using derivatives in portfolio management. It explains how the use of futures and standard options positions combined with traditional assets can alter risk-return profiles. The dynamic nature of basic options strategies associated with long positions in equity products is also covered.
Performance Presentation
Authors: Ryan Timothy P. 
Published: May 2013

Abstract
Performance presentation is highly important to investment managers, regulators, and existing clients as well as prospective clients and their intermediaries. Through performance presentations, portfolio or strategy performance and implementation are clarified in a direct and insightful manner. Presentation content may include portfolio or strategy absolute performance, peer-relative performance, index-relative performance, key drivers of performance, asset allocations or exposure weights, ex-post risk/reward characteristics, style analysis, and portfolio weighted-average characteristics. Performance presentations that are widely distributed and used by prospective clients or their intermediaries usually have specific content and presentation format that is consistent with industry guidelines and/or required by rules-based regulators. One-on-one presentations and presentations for existing clients on their portfolios typically are subject to less specific rules-based regulator-required content.
Exchange Traded Funds
Authors: Rompotis Gerasimos G. 
Published: May 2013

AbstractThis chapter discusses exchange traded funds (ETFs), which are one of the most successful financial innovations of the last two decades. A brief historical analysis of the evolution in ETF market is provided. Next, the unique characteristics and benefits, which made ETFs proliferate among investors worldwide, are discussed. Several types of ETFs are described as well as the various trading strategies available with ETFs. Then, the chapter focuses on the empirical findings of the literature in regard to the competition between ETFs and traditional mutual funds, the tracking ability of ETFs and the factors that usually affect their replication efficiency, and whether the divergence between the trading prices and net asset values of ETFs indicate future returns.
The Past, Present, and Future of Hedge Funds
Authors: Füss Roland , Müller Sarah 
Published: May 2013

AbstractThe finance literature documents that investors can benefit from adding hedge funds as part of the alternative asset class to their asset allocation. By outlining the most important literature, this chapter gives a comprehensive overview of the fundamental characteristics of hedge funds and provides evidence supporting their use in a tactical and strategic portfolio allocation context. Because hedge fund return properties differ from those of traditional asset classes, this chapter discusses appropriate performance measures as well as enhanced portfolio optimization approaches when considering hedge funds in mixed-asset portfolios. It also includes information on relevant organizational and regulatory issues. This chapter also focuses on the increased systemic relevance of hedge funds for financial markets, the complex connections they have with other financial institutions, and the implications for future regulatory developments in this industry.
Portfolio and Risk Management for Private Equity Fund Investments
Authors: Buchner Axel , Wagner Niklas 
Published: May 2013

AbstractPrivate equity investments make up large portions of institutional investors' risky asset allocations. Thus, the risk of the asset class needs to be properly understood and managed. As private equity represents a relatively opaque and illiquid asset class, standard models are inapplicable. This chapter provides a novel framework based on modeling the stochastic cash flow dynamics of private equity funds. The model consists of a mean-reverting square root process, which represents a fund's capital drawdowns, and a geometric Brownian motion with a time-dependent drift, which captures the typical time-pattern of capital distributions. The empirical analysis reveals that the model can be calibrated to a given fund cash flow data. The chapter presents several application examples of the model in the portfolio and risk management areas
An Ethological Perspective on War and Peace
Authors: Verbeek Peter 
Published: May 2013

Abstract
This chapter introduces the idea of species-typical versus species-atypical aggression. Whereas most individuals display species-typical patterns of aggression because they have been favored by natural selection over past generations, nonetheless, occasional species-atypical behavior is to be expected as well, which generally speaking will not be adaptive. Peaceful behavior is often associated with intraspecific relationships, and areas such as research on post-conflict behavior that focuses on intraspecific relationships are already well-established in the ethology of aggression and peace. Peaceful behavior is not restricted to intraspecific relationships, however, and the study of tolerance and peacekeeping both within and between species is an up-and-coming research area.
Trends in Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America
Authors: Dye David H. 
Published: May 2013

Abstract
While conflict was entwined, if not entrenched, in indigenous eastern North America, so too was the ability to limit the scope of conflict and to engender alliances, coalitions, and cooperation. This chapter presents a model of evolving trends in violence and cooperation that incorporates changes in sociopolitical organization. The model accounts for temporal variations in indigenous conflict and cooperation as well as social and political issues. Three broad cultural trends may be posited for dominant institutions associated with peacemaking and lethal aggression in eastern North America: non-segmented foragers, segmented hunter-gatherer-gardeners, and village agriculturalists. These trends, each considered in turn, are not mutually exclusive, but appear to be dominating modes of behavior associated with varying degrees of sociopolitical integration.
Social Control and Conflict Management Among Australian Aboriginal Desert People Before and After the Advent of Alcohol
Authors: Tonkinson Robert 
Published: May 2013

AbstractThis chapter examines the Mardu of Australia. It describes social control and conflict management in Western Desert “traditional” culture, which suggests a number of mutually reinforcing dispositions, norms, values, and behaviors that work to minimize both interpersonal and intergroup conflict. Given the exceptionally marginal ecological setting, protracted feuding and boundary maintaining behaviors would be suicidal. The situational and shifting nature of leadership, in combination with the dominance of classificatory kinship in structuring interpersonal relations, ensures that cooperation is the dominant mode of social being. The discussion then turns to the intrusion of Europeans and alcohol in the early twentieth century, which heralded a massive period of reaction and adjustment.
Social Signaling, Conflict Management, and the Construction of Peace
Authors: Roscoe Paul 
Published: May 2013

AbstractThis chapter addresses the political dimensions of peace. What are the processes that generate and maintain peace within every political community? And what are the processes—economic, diplomatic/political, cultural, ideological—that maintain peace between allied communities (or even, for that matter, between communities linked in cold war relations)? The chapter focuses on small-scale societies, documenting in ethnographic detail the working of a “social signaling” system, a mechanism for managing internal conflict within and among allied political communities. Its ethnographic reference is the Yangoru Boiken of Papua New Guinea, among whom the author has conducted some two years' worth of fieldwork. It considers the role that competitive pig-exchange played in transforming potentially lethal conflicts over land-tenure into nonviolent, symbolic conflicts, thereby maintaining the peace and integrity of political communities and alliances of these communities.
The Birth of a Jungle
Authors: Lundblad Michael 
Published: May 2013

AbstractExemplifying a new methodology identified as “animality studies,” which focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book explores animality at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. At that moment, shifts in what it meant to be both “human” and “animal” became crucial in terms of producing new ways of thinking about a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of black men. The discourse of “the jungle” was born at the confluence of Darwin and Freud; once human behavior could be explained, supposedly, by animal instincts that were naturally violent in the name of survival and heterosexual in the name of reproduction. Literary and cultural texts at the turn of the twentieth century addressed the “beast within,” shifting away from a Protestant Christian formulation of a devilish inner beast that was sinful and violent. This book’s central argument is that Darwinist-Freudian formulations of the human animal were often contested rather than reinforced by writers such as Jack London, Henry James and Frank Norris and cultural events such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island and the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” This book reveals how the figure of the animal evolved in U.S. literature and culture at the turn of the century, particularly through the birth of the jungle: a discourse that continues to enable enduring justifications of homophobia, economic exploitation, and racism in the United States and beyond.
Archaeology of a Humane Society
Authors: Lundblad Michael 
Published: May 2013

AbstractThis chapter explores the problematic relationship between animality and U.S. race relations at the turn of the twentieth century. Engaging the work of critics and theorists such as Jacqueline Goldsby, Gail Bederman, and Marianna Torgovnick, the chapter highlights the significance of the “humane” movement for both animals and criminals in relation to shifting constructions of black and white identities. At the end of the nineteenth century, a new logic of humane reform contributed to a rewriting of black male identity as more “savage” than “animal.” At a moment when black men were attempting to distance themselves from racist constructions of their animality, humane reform worked to contrast whiteness with the “savagery” of blackness. William James’s work on antilynching and antivivisection advocacy reveals how white men could claim the capacity for humane behavior as a marker of racial difference. As a result, animality is essentially “elevated” over blackness, enabling white men to torture and vivisect black men, thus treating them worse than animals, at the turn of the century.
Animal Legacies
Authors: Lundblad Michael 
Published: May 2013

AbstractThe epilogue focuses on the reception of William Jennings Bryan’s anti-evolution arguments in the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925, in contrast to his reputation as a progressive reformer at the turn of the century. Bryan’s objection to being characterized as an animal with “monkey” ancestors in the Scopes Trial reveals both the racist subtext of jungle discourse and the hegemony of that discourse by 1925. Ridiculed by writers such as H. L. Mencken, Joseph Wood Krutch, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Bryan’s resistance to evolutionary theory is mocked in a way that signals a fracture between progressivism of various kinds and Christian fundamentalism: a fracture that was not nearly as evident at the turn of the century, but resonates today with debates over intelligent design, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology.