Global business is affected by global terrorism and the two are intricately linked on many levels. This book is an eclectic and enlightening compendium of research that explores the interrelationships between the two. A companion to and expansion on the authors' previous books on the area,...

The current financial market crisis has impressively demonstrated the importance of aneffective credit risk management for financial institutions. At the same time, the use and thevaluation of credit derivatives has been widely criticised as a result of the crisis. Over the pastdecade, credit...

This paper empirically investigates the risk and performance of three types of alternative betaproducts over the January 2002 to September 2009 time period: funds of hedge funds (FHFs),investable hedge fund indices (IHFIs), and hedge fund replication strategies (HFRS). Weshow that IHFIs are true...

Natural catastrophes attract regularly the attention of media and have become a source of public concern. From a financial viewpoint, natural catastrophes represent idiosyncratic risks,diversifiable at the world level. But for reasons analyzed in this pap er reinsurance markets are unable to...

In June 2003 Swiss banks held over CHF 500 billion in mortgages. This important segment accounts for about 63% of all loan portfolios of Swiss banks. Since default insurance is not common in Switzerland, the corresponding risks are a severe threat for the health of the financial system. We...

In this paper we discuss some statistical pitfalls that may occur in modeling cross-dependences with copulas in financial applications. In particular we focus on issues arising in the estimation and the empirical choice of copulas as well as in the design of time-dependent copulas.

This paper argues that observations of non-stationary choice behavior need notnecessarily imply specific properties of the individual’s discount function. As weshow, the observed “anomalies” in intertemporal choice can alternatively be explained by an individual’s perception of the risk...

In spite of the fact that they can draw on a larger, more liquid and more diversifiedpool of capital than the equity of reinsurance companies, financial markets have failed to displace reinsurance as the primary risk-sharing vehicle for natural catastrophe risk. We show that this failure can be...

In this paper the performance of locally risk-minimizing hedge strategies for European options in stochastic volatility models is studied from an experimental as well as from an empirical perspective. These hedge strategies are derived for a large class of diffusion-type stochastic volatility...