The increase in life expectancy over the past several decades has been impressive and represents a key challenge for institutions that provide life insurance products. Indeed, when a new actuarial table is released with updated survival and death rates, such institutions need to update the...

It is well known that non-normality plays an important role in asset and risk management. However, handling a large number of assets has long been a challenge due to the curse of dimensionality. We describe a statistical technique, which we call Moment Component Analysis (MCA), that extends...

We implement a long-horizon static and dynamic portfolio allocation involving a risk-free and a risky asset. This model is calibrated at a quarterly frequency for ten European countries. We also use maximum-likelihood estimates and Bayesian estimates to account for parameter uncertainty. We find...

Systemic risk may be defined as the propensity of a financial institution to be undercapitalized when the financial system as a whole is undercapitalized. In this paper, we investigate the case of non-U.S. institutions, with several factors explaining the dynamics of financial firms returns and...

We evaluate how departure from normality may affect the allocation of assets. A Taylor series expansion of the expected utility allows to focus on certain moments and to compute numerically the optimal portfolio allocation. A decisive advantage of this approach is that it remains operational...

We evaluate how departure from normality may affect the conditional allocation of wealth. The expected utility function is approximated by a fourth-order Taylor expansion that allows for non-normal returns. Market returns are characterized by a joint model that captures the time dependency and...

We evaluate how deviations from normality may affect the allocation of assets. A Taylor expansion of expected utility allows us to focus on certain moments and to compute numerically the optimal portfolio allocation. A decisive advantage of our approach is that it remains operational even if a...

We develop a new methodology to measure conditional dependency between time series each driven by complicated marginal distributions. We achieve this by using copula functions that link marginal distributions, and by expressing the parameter of the copula as a function of predetermined...

Designing an investment strategy in transition economies is a difficult task because stock-markets opened through time, time series are short, and there is little guidance how to obtain expected returns and covariance matrices necessary for mean-variance portfolio allocation. Also, structural...