This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1947-2007, and on the rise in services in particular. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services. This is an unusual industry as more than 90%...

We study the influence of systematic probability misestimation on complexfinancial investment decisions on the context of structured financialproducts. Structured products have in recent years become more and morecomplex. We study the question whether this complexity might be a...

Evolutionary nance studies the dynamic interaction of investment strategies in nancialmarkets. This market interaction generates a stochastic wealth dynamics on aheterogenous population of traders through the uctuation of asset prices and theirrandom payos. Asset prices are endogenously...

In general, the properties of the conditional distribution of multiple period returns do not follow easily from the one-period data generating process. This renders computation of Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall for multiple period returns a non-trivial task. In this paper we consider some...

In this note it is argued that the estimation error in Value-at-Risk predictors gives rise to underestimation of portfolio risk. We propose a simple correction and find in an empirical illustration that it is economically relevant.

In the estimation of risk measures such as Value at Risk and Expected shortfall relatively short estimation windows are typically used rendering the estimation error a possibly non-negligible component. In this paper we build upon previous results for the Value at Risk and discuss how the...

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.