This article analyses the systematic risks of distressed securities hedge funds. Four factors largely explain the systematic risk of this strategy group: These are the returns of two options strategies, i. e. (1) a short-put position on a stock index and (2) a short-straddle position on a bond...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and new empirical evidence on frontier efficiency measurement in the insurance industry, a topic of great interest in the academic literature during the last several years. In the first step, we review 87 studies and put them into a joint...

The aim of this paper is to study the influence of nonlinear dependencies on a nonlife insurer's risk and return profile. To achieve this, we integrate several copula models in a dynamic financial analysis (DFA) framework and conduct numerical tests within a simulation study. We also test...

The contribution of this paper is to provide an overview and new empirical evidence on hedge fund performance persistence, which has been a controversial issue in the academic literature during the last several years. In the first step, we review recent studies and put them into a joint...

Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) has become an important tool in analyzing the financial situation of insurance companies. Constant development and documentation of DFA tools has occurred during the last years. However, several questions concerning the implementation of DFA systems have not been...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a nonparametric method from the area of operations research that measures the relationship of produced outputs to assigned inputs and determines an efficiency score. This efficiency score can be interpreted as a performance measure in investment analysis....

The Sharpe ratio is adequate for evaluating investment funds when the returns of those funds are normally distributed and the investor intends to place all his risky assets into just one investment fund. Hedge fund returns differ significantly from a normal distribution. For this reason, other...

Dynamic financial analysis (DFA) models an insurance company's cash flow in order to forecast assets, liabilities, and ruin probabilities, as well as full balance sheets for different scenarios. In the last years DFA has become an important tool for the analysis of an insurance company's...

As early as the 1970s, European Union (EU) member countries implemented rules to coordinate insurance markets and regulation. However, with the more recent movement toward a general single EU market, financial services regulation has taken on new meaning and priority. Solvency I regulations went...