Abstract: This thesis studies several topics related to the area of model-independent and robust finance.<br>In particular, the work addresses valuation approaches that can be applied to determine robust price bounds for exotic derivatives which are calculable without imposing assumptions on the...

We propose a nonparametric inference method for causal effects of continuous treatment variables, under unconfoundedness and in the presence of high-dimensional or nonparametric nuisance parameters. Our simple kernel-based double debiased machine learning (DML) estimators for the average...

Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) provides an elegant mathematical framework for the efficient portfolio allocation problem. Despite its exceptional popularity, MPT poses a number of well-documented problems in practical applications. Especially the fact that it generates notoriously extreme and...

Volatility break robust panel unit root tests (PURTs) recently proposed by Herwartz and Siedenburg (Computational Statistics & Data Analysis 2008, 53, 137-150) and Demetrescu and Hanck (Econometrics Letters 2012, 117, 10-13) have different performances under both the null and local alternatives....

Economists are often interested in estimating averages with respect to distributions of unobservables. Examples are moments of individual fixed-effects, average effects in discrete choice models, or counterfactual simulations in structural models. For such quantities, we propose and study...

In real-world applications, costs for products are not deterministic: neither static nor dynamic. They actually tend to be non-stationary and cross-correlated. To overcome this drawback, there have been some efforts by researchers to extend the Wagner–Whitin algorithm to consider stochastic...