The limitations of volatilities computed with daily data as well as simple statistical considerations strongly suggest to use intraday data in order to obtain accurate volatility estimates. Under a continuous time arbitrage-free setup, the quadratic variations of the prices would allow us, in...

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...

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...

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...