Dollar cost averaging (DCA) is a widely employed investment strategy in financial markets. At the same time it is also well documented that such gradual policy is sub-optimal from the point of view of risk averse decision makers with a fixed investment horizon T 0. However, an explicit strategy...

Using various techniques, Cox and Leland (1982,2000), Dybvig (1988a, 1988b), Vanduffel et al. (2009) and Bernard and Boyle (2010) have shown that in onedimensional markets, complex (path-dependent) contracts are generally not optimal for rational consumers. In this paper, we generalise these...

Copulas have become a buzzword in recent years in the academic community, and practitioners are paying more and more attention to the choice of a copula in risk management applications.This paper gives a non-technical and pedagogical introduction to the topic of copulas and explains their role...

Cox amp; Leland (2000) used techniques from the field of stochastic control theory to show that in the particular case of a Brownian motion for the asset log-returns risk averse decision makers with a fixed investment horizon prefer path-independent pay-offs over path-dependent ones. In this...

Dhaene, Denuit, Goovaerts, Kaas amp; Vyncke (2002a,b) have studied convex bounds for a sum of dependent random variables and applied these to sums of log-normal random variables. In particular, they have shown how these convex bounds can be used to derive closed-form approximations for several...

systematic factors and the latter are responsible for default dependence between different firms. Another source of default dependence is structural links between firms. For example, a mother company may consist of different legal entities and a default of the former may be contagious and lead...

In this paper we investigate approximations for the distribution function of a sum S of lognormal random variables. These approximations are obtained by considering the conditional expectation E[S | Lambda ] of S with respect to a conditioning random variable Lambda.The choice for Lambda is...

Even in case of the Brownian motion as most natural rate of return model it appears too difficult to obtain analytic expressions for most risk measures of constant continuous annuities. In literature so-called comonotonic approximations have been proposed but these still require the evaluation...

The Basel Accords represent landmark financial agreements for the regulation of commercial banks. The main purpose of the accords was to strengthen the soundness and stability of the international banking system by providing a minimum standard for capital requirements. In 2004, the Basel...