According to the latest Basel framework of Banking Supervision, financial institutions should internally assign their borrowers into a number of homogeneous groups. Each group is assigned a probability of default which distinguishes it from other groups. This study aims at determining the...

Basel II imposes regulatory capital on banks related to the default risk of their credit portfolio. Banks using an internal rating approach compute the regulatory capital from pooled probabilities of default. These pooled probabilities can be calculated by clustering credit borrowers into...

For estimating the parameters of models for financial market data, the use of robust techniques is of particular interest. Conditional forecasts, based on the capital asset pricing model, and a factor model are considered. It is proposed to consider least median of squares estimators as one...

The Nelson–Siegel–Svensson model is widely-used for modelling the yield curve, yet many authors have reported ‘numerical difficulties’ when calibrating the model. We argue that the problem is twofold: firstly, the optimisation problem is not convex and has multiple local optima. Hence...

This paper discusses the application of an index tracking technique to mutual fund replication problems. By using a tracking error (TE) minimization method and two tactical rebalancing strategies (i.e. the calendar based strategy and the tolerance triggered strategy), a multi-period fund...

In recent years, copulas have become very popular in financial research and actuarial science as they are more flexible in modelling the co-movements and relationships of risk factors as compared to the conventional linear correlation coefficient by Pearson. However, a precise estimation of the...

This paper proposes a clustering asset allocation scheme which provides better risk-adjusted portfolio performance than those obtained from traditional asset allocation approaches such as the equal weight strategy and the Markowitz minimum variance allocation. The clustering criterion used,...

Copulae provide investors with tools to model the dependency structure among financial products. The choice of copulae plays an important role in successful copula applications. However, selecting copulae usually relies on general goodness-of-fit (GoF) tests which are independent of the...

The problem of forecasting from vector autoregressive models has attracted considerable attention in the literature. The most popular non-Bayesian approaches use large sample normal theory or the bootstrap to evaluate the uncertainty associated with the forecast. The literature has concentrated...

This study presents a first comparative analysis of Lasso-type (Lasso, adaptive Lasso, elastic net) and heuristic subset selection methods. Although the Lasso has shown success in many situations, it has some limitations. In particular, inconsistent results are obtained for pairwise strongly...