Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a suffciently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. We present a life-cycle model that...

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...

Several Bayesian model combination schemes, including some novel approaches that simultaneously allow for parameter uncertainty, model uncertainty and robust time varying model weights, are compared in terms of forecast accuracy and economic gains using financial and macroeconomic time series....

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...

We characterize the investor’s optimal portfolio allocation subject to a budget constraint and a probabilistic VaR constraint in complete markets environments with a finite number of states. The set of feasible portfolios might no longer be connected or convex, while the number of local optima...