Insurance companies invest their wealth in financial markets. The wealth evolution strongly depends on the success of their investment strategies, but also on liquidity shocks which occur during unfavourable years, when indemnities to be paid to the clients exceed collected premia. An investment...

This paper focuses on the estimation of mutual fund styles by return-based style analysis. Usually, the investment style is assumed to be either constant through time, or time variation is implicitly accounted for by using rolling regressions. The former assumption is often contradicted by data...

Present value calculations require predictions of cash flows both at near and distant future points in time. Such predictions are generally surrounded by considerable uncertainty and may critically depend on assumptions about parameter values as well as the form and stability of the data...

The aim of this paper is to show, within the mean-variance framework, how the market belief can be constructed as the result of the aggregation of heterogeneous beliefs and how the market equilibrium prices of risky assets can thus be determined. The heterogeneous beliefs are defined in terms of...

Some researchers and many practitioners have move from the classic mean-variance (Markowitz, 1959) portfolio theory to a new portfolio optimization framework based on downside-risk measures that are more appropriate to the investor’s preferences. Moreover, several studies (Friedman and...

We solve the optimal saving/portfolio-choice problem in an intertemporal recursive utility framework. Our solution to this problem is sufficiently general to allow (i) risk aversion to vary independently of intertemporal substitution, (ii) many risky assets, (iii) stochastic labor income that...

International capital flows have increased dramatically since the 1980s, with much of the increase being due to trade in equity and debt markets. Such developments are often attributed to the increased integration of world financial markets. We present a model that allows us to examine how...