Consider the portfolio problem of choosing the mix between stocks and bonds under a downside risk constraint. Typically, stock returns exhibit fatter tails than bonds corresponding to their greater downside risk. Downside risk criteria like the safety first criterion, therefore, of ten select...

Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the un-priced risk of individual securities. In this paper, we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case fat tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a security...

Banks provide risky loans to firms, which have superior information regarding the quality of their projects. Due to asymmetric information the banks face the risk of adverse selection. Credit Value-at-Risk (CVaR) regulation counters the problem of low quality, i.e. high risk, loans and therefore...

A widely held notion holds that freely floating exchange rates are excessively volatile when judged against fundamentals and when moving from fixed to floating exchange rates. We re-examine the data and conclude that the disparity between the fundamentals and exchange rate volatility is more...

The forward premium puzzle (FPP) is the negative correlation between the forward premium and the realized exchange rate return at maturities of a month and beyond. Some recent evidence shows that at maturities of multiple years and at the highest intra day frequency the correlation is positive...

This paper derives indicators of the severity and structure of banking system risk from asymptotic interdependencies between banks' equity prices. We use new tools available from multivariate extreme value theory to estimate individual banks' exposure to each other (quot;contagion riskquot;) and...

We characterize asset return linkages during periods of stress by an extremal dependence measure. Contrary to correlation analysis, this non-parametric measure is not predisposed towards the normal distribution and can account for non-linear relationships. Our estimates for the G-5 countries...

We characterize asset return linkages during periods of stress by an extremal dependence measure. Contrary to correlation analysis, this non-parametric measure is not predisposed towards the normal distribution and can account for non-linear relationships. Our estimates for the G-5 countries...

Precise estimation of the tail shape of forex returns is of critical importance for proper risk assessment. We improve upon the efficiency of conventional estimators that rely on a first order expansion of the tail shape, by using the second order expansion. Here we advocate a moments estimator...

Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the unpriced risk of individual securities. In this article we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case of fat-tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a...