Economic cycles are the key credit portfolio risk driver and they are autocorrelated over time. We then show that it is economically meaningful to define risk for credit portfolios in a multi period setup. Since one period expected shortfall fails to measure risk adequately in a multi period...

We propose an affine term structure model which accommodates non-linearities in the drift and volatility function of the short-term interest rate. Such non-linearities are a consequence of discrete beta-distributed regime shifts constructed on multiple thresholds. We derive iterative closed form...

Risk management and asset pricing benefit from simple functional descriptions of the distribution of real asset returns. Recently, several authors have proposed that asset returns in real stock markets are distributed according to a hyperbolic distribution. While asset returns are generated by...

Nowcasting regards the inference on the present realization of random variables, on the basis of information available until a recent past. This paper proposes a modelling strategy aimed at a best use of the data for nowcasting based on panel data with severe deficiencies, namely short times...

In this paper, we propose an empirical method to measure the market imperfection and the bargaining power of the agents, by extending the methods of frontier analysis. A case study in the field of freight transport illustrates the proposed method.

A large number of parameterizations have been proposed to model conditional variance dynamics in a multivariate framework. This paper examines the ranking of multivariate volatility models in terms of their ability to forecast out-of-sample conditional variance matrices. We investigate how...

In this paper we study the short term price behavior of December 2008 future prices for EU emission allowances. We model returns and volatility dynamics of this price showing that a standard ARMA-GARCH framework is not adequate and that the gaussianity assumption is rejected due to the...

An important class of structural econometric models (nonlinear rational expectations,option pricing, auction models,...) characterize observable variables as highly nonlinear transformations of some latent variables. These transformations are one-to-one but they depend on the unknown...

In this paper, we survey some of the recent nonparapmetric estimation methods which were developed to price derivative contracts. We focus on equity options and staart with a so-called model-free approach which involves very little financial theory. Next we discuss nonparametric and...

In a framework of preferences over lotteries, we show that an axiom system consisting of weakened versions of Arrow's axioms has a unique solution. "Relative Utilitarianism" consists of first normalising individual von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities between 0 and 1 and then summing them. This...