Information about risk preferences from investors is essential for modelling a wide range of quantitative finance applications. Valuable information related to preferences can be extracted from option prices through pricing kernels. In this paper, pricing kernels and their term structure are...

How can we measure and compare the relative performance of production units? If input and output variables are one dimensional, then the simplest way is to compute efficiency by calculating and comparing the ratio of output and input for each production unit. This idea is inappropriate though,...

GARCH models are widely used in financial econometrics. However, we show by mean of a simple simulation example that the GARCH approach may lead to a serious model misspecification if the assumption of stationarity is violated. In particular, the well known integrated GARCH effect can be...

State price densities (SPD) are an important element in applied quantitative finance. In a Black-Scholes model they are lognormal distributions with constant volatility parameter. In practice volatility changes and the distribution deviates from log-normality. We estimate SPDs using EUREX option...

Dimension reduction techniques for functional data analysis model and approximate smooth random functions by lower dimensional objects. In many applications the focus of interest lies not only in dimension reduction but also in the dynamic behaviour of the lower dimensional objects. The most...

In this paper we estimate and empirically test different behavioral theories of consumer reference price formation. Two major theories are proposed to model the reference price reaction: assimilation contrast theory and prospect theory. We assume that different consumer segments will use...

Over recent years, study on risk management has been prompted by the Basel committee for regular banking supervisory. There are however limitations of some widely-used risk management methods that either calculate risk measures under the Gaussian distributional assumption or involve numerical...

Functional principal component analysis (FPCA) based on the Karhunen-Lo`eve decomposition has been successfully applied in many applications, mainly for one sample problems. In this paper we consider common functional principal components for two sample problems. Our research is motivated not...

The implied volatility of a European option as a function of strike price and time to maturity forms a volatility surface. Traders price according to the dynamics of this high dimensional surface. Recent developments that employ semiparametric models approximate the implied volatility surface...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (non- subsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversification of insurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in different locations. For that purpose...