This paper reassesses, at the light of economic and financial theory, the well-documented recent evolution of the euro area public debt and equity markets. Doing so leads to associating the EMU and the single market with the changes in fundamentals and financial integration with convergence in...

While empirical evidence nds only a weak relationship between nominal exchangerates and macroeconomic fundamentals, forex markets participants often attribute ex-change rate movements to a macroeconomic variable. The variables that matter, how-ever, appear to change over time and some variable...

The challenge of international term structure models is to simultaneously account for the properties of interest rate term structures and foreign exchange rates within an arbitrage-free framework. We extend the quadratic term structure models proposed in Leippold and Wu (2002) to multiple...

Empirical evidence shows that macroeconomic fundamentals have little explanatory power for nominal exchange rates. On the other hand, the recent microstructure approach to exchange rates has shown that most exchange rate volatility at short to medium horizons is related to order flows. This...

This paper investigates model risk issues in the context of mean-variance portfolio selection. We analytically and numerically show that, under model misspecification, the use of statistically robust estimates instead of the widely used classical sample mean and covariance is highly beneficial...

The wealth dynamics of insurance companies strongly depends on the success of their investment strategies, but also on liquidity shocks which occur during unfavorable years, when indemnities to be paid to the clients exceed collected premia. An investment strategy that does not take liquidity...

This paper proposes a new wealth-dependent utility function for the inter-temporal consumption and portfolio problem, in which the subsistance (bliss) con-sumption level is a function of wealth. Ratchet effects obtain when higher wealth in-creases the subsistance consumption level; blas´...

This paper studies an application of a Darwinian theory of portfolioselection to stocks listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA).We analyze numerically the long-run outcome of the competition offix-mix portfolio rules in a stock market with actual DJIA dividends.In the model seemingly...

In this paper we present a model to price and hedge basket credit derivatives andcollateralised loan obligation. Based upon the copula-approach by Schönbucher and Schubert (2001) the model allows a specification of the joint dynamics of credit spreads and default intensities, including a...

This paper presents a utility-based approach to value the borrower optimal behavior in presence of credit risk. The paper solves for the dynamic portfolio choices of a borrower. We thereby show that the presence of debt leads to a substantial modification in the borrower's behavior across states...