Thesis (M.B.A.)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2003. / [MBA professional report]. Thesis advisor(s): Philip Candreva, Kenneth Doerr, Glenn Cook. Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-69). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-106).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xi, 170 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis investigates issues relating to international portfolio diversification from the perspective of the Polish stock market in the context of the financial crisis. Beginning with an outline of the functioning of the Polish stock market, the first contribution of the thesis is to consider the risks, benefits and opportunities in this market. Within this context, trading strategies are considered with an emphasis on the impact on risk reduction or return enhancement of initial public offerings. Second, the thesis provides a model which may be relevant for measuring trend durations in equity prices. A third element of the thesis considers the influence of spill-over effects (from the financial crisis) on equity investments in Poland, incorporating country and industry specific factors. Finally, the thesis considers financial crisis contagion and policies that may be relevant for practitioners.

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The primary purpose of the study is to carry out an investigation into the role of listed real estate stocks in a mixed asset class investment portfolio in South Africa and what weighting should be allocated to this asset class. The study involved collecting data from the last ten years from January 1995 to December 2004 and then comparing the data against data collected from the investment management industry, especially those entities with exposure to direct property and listed property stock holdings over long periods. The study investigates the benefits of listed property stocks in an investment portfolio in South Africa, and empirically tests the data collected using the mean-variance theory to determine the impact of listed property stocks on the performance (maximising returns) and risk (minimising risk) of investment portfolios. The Elton and Gruber computer programme is used to test the data to give an optimal weighting to the sector and produce an efficient frontier. The weightings are then used to work out the efficiency of a portfolio as a result of the inclusion of listed property stocks, and comparing it to a portfolio of just two asset classes, namely equities and bonds, at 75% and 25% weightings respectively. The results demonstrated the benefits offered by listed real estate and revealed that the sector should be treated as a separate asset class from equities due to lower correlation of returns between these two asset classes. It also demonstrated that an increased allocation to the listed property sector would have resulted in better investment performance over the past ten years. The conclusions consistently pointed to the increased asset allocation of listed real estate in investment portfolios as the best long-term solution to diversification and volatility, as long as the liquidity and size of the sector improves. It is concluded in this study, that investment managers have underscored the relevance and allocation of listed real estate in investment portfolios in the past ten years, thus not optimising the performance and risk of their portfolios, as expected in retirement fund portfolios to the benefits of the members. / Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

This dissertation consist of three contributions to financial and insurance mathematics. The first part considers numerical methods for dynamic portfolio optimisation in the expected utility model. The aim is to compare the risk-neutral computational approach (RNCA) also known as the martingale approach to stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) in a discrete-time setting. The main idea of the RNCA is to use the completeness and the arbitrage free properties of the market to compute the optimal consumption rules and then determine the trading strategy that finance this optimal consumption. In contrast, SDP solves for the optimal consumption and investment rules simultaneously using backward recursion and the principle of optimality. The setting that we consider is a discrete time and state space lattice. We provide some new theoretical results relating to the Hyperbolic Absolute Risk Aversion class of utility functions as well as propose a straightforward implementation of RNCA in binomial and trinomial lattices. Moreover, instead of discretizing the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation with possibly more than one state variable, we use symbolic algorithms to implement stochastic dynamic programming. This new approach provides a simpler numerical procedure for computing optimal consumption-investment policies. A comparison of the RNCA with SDP demonstrates the superiority of the RNCA in terms of computation. The second part considers the pricing of contingent claims using an approach developed and applied in applied in insurance. This approach utilize probability distortion functions as the dual of the utility functions used in financial theory. The main idea of the dual theory is to distort the subjective probabilities rather than outcomes to express the investor????????s risk aversion. In the first part, the RNCA for asset allocation uses the same principle as risk-neutral valuation for derivative pricing. The idea of the second part of this research is to show that the risk-neutral valuation can be recovered from the probability distortion function approach, thereby establishing consistency between the insurance and the financial approaches. We prove that pricing contingent claims under the real world probability measure using an appropriate distortion operator produces arbitrage-free prices when the underlying asset prices are log-normal. We investigate cases when the insurance-based approach fails to produce arbitrage-free prices and determine the appropriate distortion operator under more general assumptions than those used in Black-Scholes option pricing. In the third part we introduce dynamic portfolio optimisation with risk measures based on probability distortion function and provide a formal treatment of this class of risk measures. We employ the RNCA to study the consumption-investment problem in discrete time with preferences consistent with Yaari????????s dual (non-expected utility) theory of choice. As an application, we first consider risk measures based on the Proportional Hazard Transform that treats the upside and downside of the risk differently and secondly a risk measure based on the standard Normal cumulative distribution function. When the objective is to maximise a dual utility of wealth, and the underlying security returns are normal, the efficient frontier is found to be the same as in the mean-variance portfolio problem for an equivalent risk tolerance. When the objective is to maximise a dual utility of consumption, then ????????plunging???????????? behaviour occurs ( investing everything is the risky asset). Other properties of the optimal consumption-investment policies in the dual theory are also investigated and discussed.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2006. / "December, 2006." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35-36). Online version available on the World Wide Web. Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2006]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm.