This book presents a critical analysis of the role of international institutions and their performance in terms of justification, effectiveness and efficiency. The authors begin by discussing the controversies surrounding the Tobin Tax in the context of global governance. They move on to address...

Readily available information about the current term structure of interest rates, its level and recent trends in important countries has become a standard tool of monetary policy analysis. Interest rate curves can be used for inflation and output forecasts, they may give useful indications about...

We derive no-arbitrage bounds for expected excess returns to generate scenarios used in financial applications. The bounds allow to distinguish three regions: one where arbitrage opportunities will never exist, a second where arbitrage may be present, and a third, where arbitrage opportunities...

Ledermann et al. (2011) propose random orthogonal matrix (ROM) simulation for generating multivariate samples matching means and covariances exactly. Its computational efficiency compared to standard Monte Carlo methods makes it an interesting alternative. In this paper we enhance this method׳s...

We present a cointegration analysis on the triangle (USD-DEM, USD-JPY, DEM-JPY) of foreign exchange rates using intra-day data. A vector autoregressive model is estimated and evaluated in terms of out-of-sample forecast accuracy measures. Its economic value is measured on the basis of trading...

This paper focuses on the joint dynamics of yield spreads derived from government bonds issued by member states of the European Monetary Union (EMU). A descriptive analysis shows that there are substantial and volatile spreads between zero coupon yields of EMU member countries and German Bund...

Many numerical optimization methods use scenario trees as a discrete approximation for the true (multi-dimensional) probability distributions of the problem's random variables. Realistic specifications in financial optimization models can lead to tree sizes that quickly become computationally...

This paper investigates some implications of empirically observed stochastic properties of stock returns for asset allocation problems. For that purpose, decisions of representative investors for different utility functions are compared. Actual returns are assumed to have time-varying first and...