We present a new way to model age-specific demographic variables with the example of age-specific mortality in the U.S., building on the Lee-Carter approach and extendingit in several dimensions. We incorporate covariates and model their dynamics jointly with the latent variables underlying...

Measuring and modeling financial volatility is the key to derivative pricing, asset allocation and risk management. The recent availability of high-frequency data allows for refined methods in this field. In particular, more precise measures for the daily or lower frequency volatility can be...

Empirical studies have shown that a large number of financial asset returns exhibit fat tails and are often characterized by volatility clustering and asymmetry. Also revealed as a stylized fact is Long memory or long range dependence in market volatility, with significant impact on pricing and...

The volatility implied by observed market prices as a function of the strikeand time to maturity form an Implied Volatility Surface (IV S). Practicalapplications require reducing the dimension and characterize its dynamicsthrough a small number of factors. Such dimension reduction is...

We propose a general class of Markov-switching-ARFIMA processes in order to combine strands of long memory and Markov-switching literature. Although the coverage of this class of models is broad, we show that these models can be easily estimated with the DLV algorithm proposed. This algorithm...

Risk management technology applied to high dimensional portfolios needs simple and fast methods for calculation of Value-at-Risk (VaR). The multivariate normal framework provides a simple off-the-shelf methodology but lacks the heavy tailed distributional properties that are observed in data. A...

GARCH models are widely used in financial econometrics. However, we show by mean of a simple simulation example that the GARCH approach may lead to a serious model misspecification if the assumption of stationarity is violated. In particular, the well known integrated GARCH effect can be...

We present an object-oriented software framework allowing to specify, solve, and estimate nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. The implemented solution methods for finding the unknown policy function are the standard linearization around the deterministic steady state, and a...

We present a comprehensive framework for Bayesian estimation of structural nonlinear dynamic economic models on sparse grids. The Smolyak operator underlying the sparse grids approach frees global approximation from the curse of dimensionality and we apply it to a Chebyshev approximation of the...