Markowitz’s (1952) portfolio theory has permeated financial institutions over the past 50 years. Assuming that returns are normally distributed, Markowitz suggests that portfolio optimization should be performed in a mean-variance framework. With the emergence of hedge funds and their...

In this paper we compare a set of different standard GARCH models with a group of Markov Regime-Switching GARCH (MRS-GARCH) in terms of their ability to forecast the US stock market volatility at horizons that range from one day to one month. To take into account the excessive persistence...

We propose a simple and implementable model of credit contagion where we in-clude macro- and microstructural dependencies among the debtors within a creditportfolio. We show that, even for diversified portfolios, moderate microstructuraldependencies have already a significant impact on the tails...

We shed new light on the negative relationship between real stock returns or real interest rates and (i) ex post inflation, (ii) expected inflation, (iii) unexpected inflation and (iv) changes in expected inflation. Using the structural vector autoregression methodology, we propose a...