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Rossen Valkanov

Zable Endowed Chair in Management Leadership, Professor of Finance, Co-Director, Master of Finance Program

Rossen Valkanov is the Zable Endowed Chair in Management and Professor of Finance at the Rady School of Management, and inaugural Co-Director of the new Master’s in Finance program.  He was Associate Dean of Faculty at the Rady School from 2020-2023. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University (1999) and graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Irvine with a BA in economics (1995). His main research interests are in the areas of empirical finance, financial econometrics, financial forecasting, risk management, portfolio allocation, and real estate. Professor Valkanov has authored numerous articles and book chapters. His research has been published in some of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. Empirical methods and big data applications based on his research—such as Mixed Data Sampling Regressions (MIDAS), parametric portfolio approaches, and forecasting procedures—have received significant interest from the finance industry practitioners. He is currently Editor of the Journal of Empirical Finance.

Professor Valkanov has taught at UCLA, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and various other institutions in the US and abroad. He is an award winning educator and teaches regularly in the Masters of Finance, Full-Time MBA, Flex MBA, Evening MBA, and Executive MBA programs at UCSD. He is a member of many professional organizations, including the American Finance Association, the American Economic Association, the Econometric Society, and the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

Published and Forthcoming Papers

Reher, M. and Valkanov, R., “The Mortgage-Cash Premium Puzzle,” The Journal of Finance forthcoming.

Boons, M., Ottonello, G., and Valkanov, R. “Do Credit Markets Respond to Macro Shocks? The Case for Reverse Causality” The Journal of Finance 78(5) 2901-2943, 2023.

Direct versus Iterated Multi-Period Volatility Forecasts (with Eric Ghysels, Alberto Plazzi, Antonio Rubia, and Asad Dossani) Annual Review of Financial Economics 2019, 11, 173-195.

Commercial Real Estate as an Asset Class  ( with Andra Ghent and Walter Torous) Annual Review of Financial Economics 2019, 11, 153-171.

Complexity in Structured Finance (with Andra Ghent and Walter Torous) Review of Economic Studies 2019, 86:2, 694-722.

Why Invest in Emerging Markets? The Role of Conditional Return Asymmetry (with E. Ghysels and A. Plazzi) The Journal of Finance 2016, 71(5), 2145-2192.

A MIDAS Approach to Modeling First and Second Moment Dynamics (with Davide Pettenuzzo and Allan Timmermann) Journal of Econometrics 2016, 193, pp. 315-334.

Comparing Securitized and Balance Sheet Loans: Size Matters (with A. Ghent) Management Science 2016, 62:10, 2784-2803.

Forecasting Stock Returns Under Economic Constraints (with Davide Pettenuzzo and Allan Timmermann) Journal of Financial Economics 2014, 114(3), 517-553.

Forecasting Real Estate Prices (with Ghysels, E., Plazzi, A., and Torous, W.), Prepared for the Handbook of Economic Forecasting: Vol II, G. Elliott and A. Timmermann (Eds.), Elsevier.

Exploiting Property Characteristics in Commercial Real Estate Portfolio Allocation (with A. Plazzi and W. Torous), Journal of Portfolio Management, 35(5), 39-50, 2011.

Forecasting Volatility with MIDAS (with Eric Ghysels), forthcoming in Volatility Models and Their Applications, Eds. Bauwens, L., Hafner, C., and Laurent, S, John Wiley and Sons.

Expected Returns and the Expected Growth in Rents of Commercial Real Estate (with Walter Torous and Alberto Plazzi), Review of Financial Studies, 23(9), 3469-3519, 2010.

Parametric Portfolio Policies: Exploiting Characteristics in the Cross Section of Equity Returns, (with M. Brandt and P. Santa-Clara) Review of Financial Studies, 22, 3411-3447, 2009.

The Cross Sectional Dispersion of Commercial Real Estate Returns and Rent Growth: Time Variation and Economic Fluctuations (with A. Plazzi and Torous) Real Estate Economics, 36(3), 403-43, 2008.

Hong, H., Torous, W., and Valkanov, R., Do Industries Lead Stock Markets? Journal of Financial Economics, 83(2) 367-396, 2007.
    [Note] [Data and Code]

Ghysels, E., Plazzi, A., Valkanov, R., Valuation in the US Commercial Real Estate, European Financial Management, 13(3), 472-497, 2007.

Predicting Volatility: How to Get Most Out of Returns Data Sampled at Different Frequencies (with P. Santa-Clara and E. Ghysels), Journal of Econometrics, 131, 59-95.

Ghysels, E., Sinko, A. and Valkanov, R., MIDAS Regressions: Further Results and New Directions, Econometric Reviews, 26, 53-90, 2006.

There is a Risk-Return Tradeoff After All (with Pedro Santa-Clara and Eric Ghysels) The Journal of Financial Economics (2005) v76(3), p. 509-548

Functional Central Limit Theorem Approximations and the Distribution of the Dickey-Fuller Test with Strongly Heteroskedastic Data Economics Letters (2005) v86(3), pp 427-433.

On Predicting Stock Returns with Nearly Integrated Explanatory Variables (with Walter Torous and Shu Yan) The Journal of Business (2005) v77(4), pp 937-966.

Political Cycles and the Stock Market (with Pedro Santa-Clara) The Journal of Finance (2003) v58(5), pp 1841-1872. Updated Main Results (January, 2004)

Long-Horizon Regressions: Theoretical Results and Applications The Journal of Financial Economics (2003) v68, 201-232.


Working Papers

Excess Volatility in Professional Stock Return Forecasts (with M. Boons and G. Ottonello)

Corporate Bond Portfolios and Asset-Specific Information (with Maximilian Bredendiek and Giorgio Ottonello)

The Risk-Return Relationship and Financial Crises (with Eric Ghysels and Alberto Plazzi)

Which Mergers Destroy Value? Only Mega-Mergers (with Dinara Bayazitova and Matthias Kahl)

Does the Early Exercise Premium Contain Information about Future Underlying Returns? (with Pradeep Yadav and Yuzhao Zhang)

Boundaries of Predictability: Noisy Predictive Regressions (with Walter Torous)

The Fed’s Effect on Excess Returns and Inflation is Bigger Than You Think. (with Shingo Goto)

Fiscal Policy and Asset Returns (with Jose Tavares)

The MIDAS Touch: Mixed Data Sampling Regression Models (with Eric Ghysels and Pedro Santa-Clara)

Long-Horizon Regressions when the Predictor is Slowly Varying (with Roger Moon and Antonio Rubia)

Research Areas

  • Empirical Asset Pricing
  • Financial Econometrics
  • PortfolioChoice
  • Monetary Policy
  • Real Estate

Industry Areas

  • Finance
  • Asset Allocation
  • Monetary Policy
  • Real Estate