Consider the portfolio problem of choosing the mix between stocks and bonds under a downside risk constraint. Typically stock returns exhibit fatter tails than bonds corresponding to their greater downside risk. Downside risk criteria like the safety first criterion therefore often select corner...

This paper focuses on the stability aspects of cross-border banking. We first argue that cross-border banking brings about various benefits and costs for financial stability. Based on this, we draw conclusions for the desirability of cross-border banking in the EU, and derive implications for...

Actual portfolios contain fewer stocks than are implied by standard financial analysis that balances the costs of diversification against the benefits in terms of the standard deviation of the returns. Suppose a safety first investor cares about downside risk and recognizes the heavy

The Basel II Accord requires that banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) communicate their daily risk forecasts to the appropriate monetary authorities at the beginning of each trading day, using one or more risk models to measure Value-at-Risk (VaR). The risk estimates of...

This experimental study is concerned with the impact of the timing of the resolution of risk on people’s willingness to take risks, with a special focus on the role of affect. While the importance of anticipatory emotions has so far been only inferred from decisions regarding hypothetical...

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different, possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patterns simultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decision making. In this paper we present a simple...

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...

This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...

This paper points out the importance of Stochastic Dominance (SD) efficient sets being convex. We review

We study the relation between the credit cycle and macro-economic fundamentals in an intensity-based framework. Using rating transition and default data of U.S. corporates from Standard and Poor’s over the period 1980—2005 we directly estimate the credit cycle from the micro rating data. We...