Yield curves are used to imply the forward rates and discount factors from market tradable instruments and are required to discount future cash flows and evaluate the price of all financial contracts. Not all instruments can be included in the yield curve calibration or fitting process, hence we...

This study introduces a non linear model of commodity futures prices which accounts for the pressures due to hedging and speculative activities. The interaction with the corresponding spot market is considered assuming that a long term equilibrium relationship holds between futures and spot...

Popular yield curve models include affine term structure models. These models are usually based on a fixed set of parameters which is calibrated to the actual financial market conditions. Under changing market conditions also parametrization changes. We discuss how parameters need to be updated...

This paper analyzes the effect of the recent market crash on the international diversification of equity portfolios from the perspective of dependence structure. We use the generalized Pareto distribution to fit the left and the right tail of each return distribution in order to evaluate the...

I present a methodology for evaluating the performance of fixed-income investment managers, over the last ten years. A cross-section of such managers reveals that alpha does not reflect most non-market performance, unless a regime-switching model is used. The quest is for arriving at qualitative...

We perform various experiments correlating past changes of social indicators about a country with future stock market returns for that country. The 169 social indicators we use, which go back as far as the year 1900, are available from the Varieties of Democracy Project. We use two sets of data...

Responses of asset returns to indices introduce kurtosis in portfolio returns. Preoccupation with ‘tail-risk' entails modeling portfolio exposure to second and fourth moment deviations around the mean return. For quadratic utility optimizers, kurtosis aversion could be viewed as either...

Default risk in equity returns can be measured by structural models of default. In this paper we propose a credit warning signal (CWS) based on the Merton default risk (MDR) model and a Regime-switching default risk (RSDR) model. The RSDR model is a generalization of the MDR model, comprises...

We quantify crash risk in currency returns. To accomplish this task, we develop and estimate an empirical model of exchange rate dynamics using daily data for four currencies relative to the US dollar: the Australian dollar, the British pound, the Swiss franc, and the Japanese yen. The model...

We study optimal hedging design for returns on an Italian equity mutual fund index since 2008. Alternative hedging instruments include one-month futures contracts for FTSE-MIB, FTSE100 and Xetra DAX. We use bivariate models of our Italian equity mutual fund index and each hedging instrument to...