Risk and Return in Asian Emerging Markets offers readers a firm insight into the risk and return characteristics of leading Asian emerging market participants by comparing and contrasting behavioral model variables with predictive forecasting methods.

Real estate finance is a fast-developing area where top quality research is in great demand. In the US, the real estate market is worth about US$4 trillion, and the REITs market about US$200 billion; tens of thousands of real estate professionals are working in this area. The market overseas could be considerably larger, especially in Asia. Given the rapidly growing real estate securities industry, this book fills an important gap in current real estate research and teaching. It is an ideal reference for investment professionals as well as senior MBA and PhD students. Contents: Introduction: Real Estate Analysis in a Dynamic Risk Environment; The Predictability of Returns on Equity REITs and Their Co-Movement with Other Assets; The Predictability of Real Estate Returns and Market Timing; A Time-Varying Risk Analysis of Equity and Real Estate Markets in the US and Japan; Price Reversal, Transaction Costs, and Arbitrage Profits in Real Estate Securities Market; Bank Risk and Real Estate: An Asset Pricing Perspective; Assessing the OC Santa ClausOCO Approach to Asset Allocation: Implications for Commercial Real Estate Investment; The Time-Variation of Risk for Life Insurance Companies; The Return Distributions of Property Shares in Emerging Markets; Conditional Risk Premiums of Asian Real Estate Stocks; Institutional Factors and Real Estate Returns: A Cross-Country Study. Readership: Financial researchers, real estate investors and investment bankers, as well as senior MBA and PhD students."

"Drawing on practical methods used by successful risk managers in emerging and developed markets throughout the world, the book provides specific guidance on establishing a modern risk management framework and developing efficient approaches to increase the profitability of risk management activities in emerging market settings."--BOOK JACKET.

This book addresses three main dimensions of risk management in emerging markets: 1) the effectiveness of risk management practices; 2) current issues and challenges in risk assessment and modelling in emerging market countries; 3) the responses of emerging markets to the recent financial crises and the design of risk management models.

We investigate how corporate stock returns respond to geopolitical risk in the case of South Korea, which has experienced large and unpredictable geopolitical swings that originate from North Korea. To do so, a monthly index of geopolitical risk from North Korea (the GPRNK index) is constructed using automated keyword searches in South Korean media. The GPRNK index, designed to capture both upside and downside risk, corroborates that geopolitical risk sharply increases with the occurrence of nuclear tests, missile launches, or military confrontations, and decreases significantly around the times of summit meetings or multilateral talks. Using firm-level data, we find that heightened geopolitical risk reduces stock returns, and that the reductions in stock returns are greater especially for large firms, firms with a higher share of domestic investors, and for firms with a higher ratio of fixed assets to total assets. These results suggest that international portfolio diversification and investment irreversibility are important channels through which geopolitical risk affects stock returns.

Using a unique data set consisting of more than 36.5 million submitted retail investor orders over the course of five years, Matthias Burghardt constructs an innovative retail investor sentiment index. He shows that retail investors’ trading decisions are correlated, that retail investors are contrarians, and that a profitable trading strategy can be based on these aggregated sentiment measures.

Changes in sovereign ratings affect country risk and stock returns. And these changes are transmitted across countries, with neighbor-country effects being more significant.