We present a model in which a sovereign country optimally decides on its consumption and investment policies as well as on the optimal time to default. In the paper we allow the sovereign borrower to keep the fraction of its augmented wealth in so-called international reserves. We further assume...

Value at Risk (VaR) has emerged in recent years as a standard tool to measure and control the risk of trading portfolios.Yet,existing theoretical analyses of the optimal behavior of a trader subject to VaR limits have produced a negative view of VaR as a risk-control tool. In particular,VaR...

In this paper we study the optimal portfolio management for the constant relative-risk averse investor who maximizes an expected utility of his terminal wealth and who faces transaction costs during his trades. In our model the investor's portfolio consists of one risky and one risk-free asset,...

We present a geometric approach to discrete time multiperiod mean variance portfolio optimization that largely simplifies the mathematical analysis and the economic interpretation of such model settings. We show that multiperiod mean variance optimal policies can be decomposed in an orthogonal...

Constraints on downside risk, measured by shortfall probability, expected shortfall, semi-variance etc., lead to optimal asset allocations which differ from the meanvariance optimum. The resulting optimization problem can become quite complex as it exhibits multiple local extrema and...

We consider a nonparametric method to estimate conditional expected shortfalls, i.e. conditional expected losses knowing that losses are larger than a given loss quantile. We derive the asymptotic properties of kernal estimators of conditional expected shortfalls in the context of a stationary...

Much of the traditional economic theory of insurance is based on the assumption that the risk against which insurance is to be purchased is entirely exogenous. This is usually modelled by simply allowing the individual to include insurance as a mechanism of covering risk, without any real...

We study a test statistic on the integrated squared difference between a kernel estimator of the copula density and a kernel smoothed estimator of the parametric copula density. We show for fixed smoothing parameters that the test is consistent and that the asymptotic properties are driven by a...

We consider distributional free inference to test for positive quadrant dependence, i.e.for the probability that two variables are simultaneously small (or large) being at least as great as it would be were they dependent. Tests for its generalisation in higher dimensions, namely positive...

In this paper, we characterize explicitly the first derivative of the Value at Risk and the Expected Shortfall with respect to portfolio allocation when netting between positions exists. As a particular case, we examine a simple Gaussian example in order to illustrate the impact of netting...