Beta-sorted portfolios - portfolios comprised of assets with similar covariation to selected risk factors - are a popular tool in empirical finance to analyze models of (conditional) expected returns. Despite their widespread use, little is known of their statistical properties in contrast to...

A primary goal in modelling the dynamics of implied volatility surfaces (IVS) aims at reducing complexity. For this purpose one fits the IVS each day and applies a principal component analysis using a functional norm. This approach, however, neglects the degenerated string structure of the...

The current European Debt Crisis has led to a reinforced effort to identify the sources of risk and their influence on yields of European Government Bonds. Until now, the potentially nonlinear influence and the theoretical need for interactions reflecting flighttoquality and flight-to-liquidity...

We investigate a model in which we connect slowly time varying unconditional long-run volatility with short-run conditional volatility whose representation is given as a semi-strong GARCH (1,1) process with heavy tailed errors. We focus on robust estimation of both long-run and short-run...

Individual players in a simultaneous equation binary choice model act differently in different environments in ways that are frequently not captured by observables and a simple additive random error. This paper proposes a random coefficient specification to capture this type of heterogeneity in...

Equity basket correlation is an important risk factor. It characterizes the strength of linear dependence between assets and thus measures the degree of portfolio diversification. It can be estimated both under the physical measure from return series, and under the risk neutral measure from...

We introduce the notion of realized copula. Based on assumptions of the marginal distributions of daily stock returns and a copula family, realized copula is defined as the copula structure materialized in realized covariance estimated from within-day high-frequency data. Copula parameters are...

The prices of wine is a key topic for market participants interested in valuing their stock, including dealers, restaurants or consumers who may be interested in optimizing their purchases. As a closely related issue, re-valuation is the need to regularly update the value of a stock. This need...

Stock picking is the field of financial analysis that is of particular interest for many professional investors and researchers. In this study stock picking is implemented via binary classification trees. Optimal tree size is believed to be the crucial factor in forecasting performance of the...

This chapter deals with nonparametric estimation of the risk neutral density. We present three different approaches which do not require parametric functional assumptions on the underlying asset price dynamics nor on the distributional form of the risk neutral density. The first estimator is a...