In several countries a major factor contributing to the current economic crisis was massive borrowing to fund investment projects on the basis of, in retrospect, grossly optimistic valuations. The purpose of this paper is to initiate an approach to project valuation and risk management in which...

Framing immunity -- What can immunity do? -- Immunological narratives -- The popularisation of immunology -- Immunity and digital media -- Immune selves -- Fragile immunitary economies -- Immunity and its discontents.

Over the last two decades, risk-sensitive control has evolved into an innovative and successful framework for solving dynamically a wide range of practical investment management problems. This book shows how to use risk-sensitive investment management to manage portfolios against an investment...

Robert Merton opened a new chapter in finance with his two papers (Merton, 1969; Merton, 1971), reprinted in his book (Merton, 1992), on dynamic asset allocation. Aside from taking a decisive step away from Markowitz-style single-period models, these papers made the key link with stochastic control...

In this chapter, we consider the situation of an investor who manages a portfolio of assets partly funded by an external liability. This is the typical case for banks, insurance companies and hedge funds. Asset and liabilitymanagement (ALM) problems have generated a substantial literature and a...

The problem we have considered so far relates to the finite horizon criterion $$J_{RS}^\theta (t;\,x,\,h)\,: = \, - {1 \over \theta }\ln {\Bbb E}{e^{ - \theta F(t;\,x,\,h)}}$$. There is also a rich literature on risk-sensitive control problems set over an infinite horizon, including Bielecki and...

The objective of this chapter is to illustrate how some of the models developed in the first part of the book can be useful to address practical investment management questions. We consider four short cases. The first one explores the interest of including a factor X(t) compared to the...

AbstractWe investigate the stock market crashes in China, Iceland, and the US in the 2007–2009 period. The bond stock earnings yield difference model is used as a prediction tool. Historically, when the measure is too high, meaning that long bond interest rates are too high relative to the...