This paper assesses financial sector development in Latin America, both in the banking system and in the capital markets. After a brief review of the explanatory factors and the definitions of financial development found in the literature, Latin American countries are classified in groups of...

A problemática deste artigo centra-se nas diferenças de competitividade entre interior e litoral, tomando os territórios concelhios como espaço de análise. Não obstante as enormes diferenças conhecidas, supôs-se poder existir um potencial de competitividade nas cidades do interior do...

The selection of ‘representative’ farms in farm level modelling where results are aggregated to the sector level is critically important if the effects of aggregation bias are to be reduced. The process of selecting representative farms normally involves the use of cluster analysis where the...

A quadratic discrete time probabilistic model, for optimal portfolio selection in (re-)insurance is studied. For positive values of underwriting levels, the expected value of the accumulated result is optimized, under constraints on its variance and on annual ROE's. Existence of a unique...

We propose a model of portfolio selection under ambiguity, based on a two-stage valuation procedure which disentangles ambiguity and ambiguity aversion. The model does not imply 'extreme pessimism' from the part of the investor, as multiple priors models do. Furthermore, its analytical...

We propose a novel portfolio selection approach that manages to ease some of the problems that characterise standard expected utility maximisation. The optimal portfolio is no longer defined as the extremum of a suitably chosen utility function: the latter, instead, is reinterpreted as the...

Der Verlust an Biodiversität gilt als eines der zentralen Umweltprobleme. Um die Bedeutung der Biodiversität aufzuzeigen, wird heute in Wissenschaft und Praxis meist der Wert einzelner Arten oder Ökosysteme bestimmt. Die zugrundeliegende Überlegung ist, dass eine Art oder ein Ökosystem...

Loss of biodiversity is regarded as one of the key problems affecting the environment. In order to demonstrate the significance of biodiversity, the value of individual species or ecosystems today is generally determined in science and practice. The underlying thought is that a species or...

The Value-at-Risk (VAR) measure is based on only the second moment of a rates of return distribution. It is an insufficient risk performance measure, since it ignores both the higher moments of the pricing distributions, like skewness and kurtosis, and all the fractional moments resulting from...

Portfolio diversification may not always lower the portfolio risk, but may actually increase it. It depends on the long memory and distributional stability characteristics of the underlying rates of return. This disturbing result is based on the theoretical Fama- Samuelson proposition of...