The phenomenon of high volatility in financial markets stemming from the increased complexity of financial instruments traded, as well as the evidence of losses due to natural and man-made catastrophes, highlight the need for sophisticated risk management practices. The analysis concerning the...

Random populations represented by stochastically scattered collections of real-valued points are abundant across many fields of science. Fractality, in the context of random populations, is conventionally associated with a Paretian distribution of the population's values.

This paper proposes an extreme value approach to estimating interest-rate volatility, and shows that during the extreme movements of the U.S. Treasury market the volatility of interest-rate changes is underestimated by the standard approach that uses the thin-tailed normal distribution. The...