Dennis Bams

• Professor (Full) at Maastricht University

In this paper, we seek to inform managers, regulators, and investors of the setting in which a firm's environmental management activity is costly and when it is profitable. To identify this setting, we classify firms according to their environmental management activities and the subsequent impact on firm operating performance. This classification h...

Do large credit risk shocks spill over to small businesses and affect their real economic activity? Using information on small business credit risk, we find that small businesses show increased default and bankruptcy rates following a shock to a customer industry. On an industry level, the shock to a customer industry is followed by a decrease in i...

Previous studies find as the VIX goes up, the return and the Sharpe ratio on liquidity provision increase. We argue these two phenomena are correlated because they depend on the same fundamentals: investors’ risk aversion, asset variances and asset correlations. Our theoretical model shows (1) when investors are more risk-averse, they expect a high...

We show that capital requirements on small business loans (SBL) based on Basel Committee's Internal Ratings Based (IRB) rules are too high relative to those for corporate loans (CL), as they are not based on actual SBL data. We argue that SBL are not put on a level playing field with CL, whose requirements were calibrated on historical data. We sho...

Do large credit risk shocks spillover to small businesses and affect their real economic activity? Using information on small business credit risk, we find that small businesses experience increased default and bankruptcy rates following a shock to a customer industry. On an industry level, the shock to a customer industry is followed by a decrease...

Firms depend heavily on trade credit. This paper introduces a trade credit network into a structural model of a production network economy. In the empirical analysis of the model, we find that trade credit is an elusive insurance: as long as a firm is financially unconstrained and times are good, more trade credit enhances sales stability and insur...

We evaluate and compare the abilities of the implied volatility and historical volatility models to provide accurate Value-at-Risk forecasts. Our empirical tests on the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq 100 indices over long time series of more than 20 years of daily data indicate that an implied volatility based Value-at-Risk cannot...

We proxy uncertainty in the stock oil and gold markets with the variance risk premia, extracted from futures and option contracts. We observe that an independent increase in the stock, oil or gold markets uncertainty coincides with negative returns in different industries. However, only the stock market uncertainty is a systematic priced factor in...

Previous studies on the cross-sectional market moments’ risk premia find significantly negative risk premia for the market volatility and the market skewness risks and a positive premium for the market kurtosis risk. However, a significantly negative price of risk for the market skewness and a positive price of risk for the market kurtosis move aga...

We examine whether the actual investment objectives of mutual funds are different from the advertised investment objectives which are written in their prospectus. We then investigate the causes and consequences of potential deviations by proposing a novel approach to determine the misclassification level of mutual funds. Our results provide importa...

This paper generalizes the existing asymptotic single-factor model to address issues related to industry heterogeneity, default clustering and capital requirement’s parameter uncertainty in US retail loan portfolios. We argue that the Basel II capital requirement overstates the riskiness of small businesses even with prudential adjustments.Moreover...

In this paper, we investigate the importance of different loss functions when estimating and evaluating option pricing models. Our analysis shows that it is important to take into account parameter uncertainty, because this leads to uncertainty in the predicted option price. We illustrate the effect on the out-of-sample pricing errors in an applica...

In this paper, we investigate the importance of different loss functions when estimating and evaluating option pricing models. Our analysis shows that it is important to take into account parameter uncertainty, since this leads to uncertainty in the predicted option price. We illustrate the effect on the out-of-sample pricing errors in an applicati...

In this paper we examine the performance of US equity funds (locals) versus UK equity funds (foreigners) also investing in the US equity market. Based on informational disadvantages one would expect the UK funds to under-perform the US funds, especially in the research-intensive small company market. After controlling for tax treatment, fund object...

In this paper we investigate the ability of different models to produce useful VaR-estimates for exchange rate positions. Our analysis shows that it is important to take into account parameter uncertainty, since this leads to uncertainty in the predicted VaR. We make this uncertainty in the VaR explicit by means of simulation. Our empirical results...

In this Paper we investigate the ability of different models to produce useful VaR-estimates for exchange rate positions. We make a distinction between models that include sophisticated tail properties and models that do not. The former type of models often leads to too extreme VaR-estimates, whereas the latter type underestimates the risk in case...

In the present paper a comprehensive assessment of existing mutual fund performance models is presented. Using a survivor-bias free database of all US mutual funds, we explore the added value of introducing extra variables such as size, book-to-market, momentum and a bond index. In addition to that we evaluate the use of introducing time-variation...

This paper proposes panel data tests of Gaussian affine term structure models. Yield curve data for different moments in time are pooled with the factors treated as fixed effects. With fixed effects the time series properties of the price of risk can be ignored. Results of tests with US interest rate data show that the Gaussian model is able to cap...

Standard real business cycle models must rely on total factor productivity (TFP) shocks to explain the observed comovement of consumption, investment, and hours worked. This paper shows that a neoclassical model consistent with observed heterogeneity in labor supply and consumption can generate comovement in the absence of TFP shocks. Intertemporal...

In this article, we develop and estimate an econometric panel data model to capture the common dynamics in dollar risk premia in various forward foreign exchange rates. The common component in the dollar risk premium is highly significant and embodies a common pattern of positive serial correlation (persistence) for the pound, the yen and the mark....

This paper presents an overview of the European mutual fund industry and investigates mutual fund performance using a survivorship bias controlled sample of 506 funds from the five most important mutual fund countries. The latter is done using the Carhart (1997) 4-factor asset-pricing model. In addition we investigate whether European fund managers...

Return-based style analysis investigates the exposure of mutual funds to a number of style indices. Because the style weights need to meet particular constraints, traditionally only point estimates of the style exposures have been reported. In this paper we include the entire asymptotic distribution of the style weights. These results are obtained...

For the purpose of Value-at-Risk (VaR) analysis, a model for the return distribution is important because it describes the potential behavior of a financial security in the future. What is primarily, is the behavior in the tail of the distribution since VaR analysis deals with extreme market situations. We analyze the extension of the normal distri...

This paper presents an overview of the European mutual fund industry and investigates mutual fund performance using a survivorship bias controlled sample of 506 funds from the 5 most important mutual fund countries. The latter is done using the Carhart (1997) 4-factor asset-pricing model. In addition we investigate whether European fund managers ex...

This paper proposes a panel data framework for tests of affine models of the term structure of interest rates which cover equilibrium (or endogenous) models as well as extended (or exogenous, evolutionary) models. The econometric model pools yield curve data for different moments in time. Since each cross-sectional yield curve only depends on the r...

This paper describes alternative approaches to estimate the Value at Risk (VaR) of a position. Four methods are compared: the unconditional case, the model with time varying drift (modeled as an AR(l) process), the model with time varying drift and time varying volatility (modeled as a GARCH(I,l) process) with error terms that are normally distribu...