An intensive and still growing body of research focuses on estimating a portfolio’s Value-at-Risk. Depending on both the degree of non-linearity of the instruments comprised in the portfolio and the willingness to make restrictive assumptions on the underlying statistical distributions, a...

A growing number of empirical studies provides evidence that dynamic properties of macroeconomic time series have been changing over time. Model-based procedures for the measurement of business cycles should therefore allow model parameters to adapt over time. In this paper the time dependencies...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

We propose procedures for estimating the time-dependent transition matrices for the general class of finite nonhomogeneous continuous-time semi-Markov processes. We prove the existence and uniqueness of solutions for the system of Volterra integral equations defining the transition matrices,...

The first three factors resulting from a principal components analysis of term structure data are in the literature typically interpreted as driving the level, slope and curvature of the term structure. Using slight generalisations of theorems from total positivity, we present sufficient...

The Algarve region in Portugal is often considered as one of the most appealing regions for tourism in the country. Its attractive location and moderate climate have since the mid-1960s brought increasing economic prosperity. As a result of the development of mass tourism, available land-use...

Most of the available monthly interest data series consist of monthly averages of daily observations. It is well- known that this averaging introduces spurious autocorrelation effects in the first differences of the series. It is exactly this differenced series we are interested in when...

We present a new framework for the joint estimation of the default-free government term structure and corporate credit spread curves. By using a data set of liquid, German mark denominated bonds, we show that this yields more realistic spreads than traditionally obtained spread curves that...

This paper compares the behaviour of a bias-corrected estimator assuming strongly exogenous regressors to the behaviour of a bias-corrected estimator assuming weakly exogenous regressors, when in fact the marginal model contains a feedback mechanism. To this end, the effects of a feedback...

We value rating-triggered step-up bonds with three methods: (i) the Jarrow, Lando and