It is common practice to identify the number and sources of shocks that move implied volatilities across space and time by applying Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to pooled covariance matrices of changes in implied volatilities. This approach, however, is likely to result in a loss of...

The analysis of diffusion processes in financial models is crucially dependent on the form of the drift and diffusion coefficient functions. A methodology is proposed for estimating and testing coefficient functions for ergodic diffusions that are not directly observable. It is based on...

The bootstrap is a method for estimating the distribution of an estimator or test statistic by resampling one’s data or a model estimated from the data. The methods that are available for implementing the bootstrap and the accuracy of bootstrap estimates depend on whether the data are a random...

Multivariate Volatility Models belong to the class of nonlinear models for financial data. Here we want to focus on multivariate GARCH models. These models assume that the variance of the innovation distribution follows a time dependent process conditional on information which is generated by...

We introduce a new method for the estimation of discount functions, yield curves and forward curves from government issued coupon bonds. Our approach is non-parametric and does not assume particular functional form for the discount function although we do show how to impose various restrictions...

Healthcare expenditure has increased substantially in all western industrialized countries in the last decades. The necessity to contain the increase in health care expenditure has motivated the Analysis of its determinants to explain differences across countries and health systems. However,...