We study the possibility for international diversification of catastrophe risk by the insurance sector. Adopting the argument that large insurance losses may be a `globalizing factor' for the industry, we study the dependence of geographically distant insurance markets via equity returns. In...

This paper documents the existence of large structural breaks in the unconditional correlations among the British pound, Norwegian krone, Swedish krona, Swiss franc, and euro exchange rates (against the US dollar) during the period 1994-2003. Using the framework of dynamic conditional...

A number of recent theoretical studies have explored trading in fragmented markets, e.g. Biais et al. (2000), a phenomenon increasingly witnessed in modern markets. The key assumption generating the results is that there is at least one liquidity demander exploiting access to all markets by...

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...

The stock market collapse led to political tensions between generations due to the fuzzy definition of the property rights over the pension funds’ wealth. The problem is best resolved by the introduction of generational accounts. Modern consumption and portfolio theory shows that the younger...

This paper argues that historical political preferences on the role of capital markets

Contemporary financial stochastic programs typically involve a trade-off between return and (downside)-risk. Using stochastic programming we characterize analytically (rather than numerically) the optimal decisions that follow from characteristic single-stage and multi-stage versions of such...

The linear Gaussian state space model for which the common variance is treated as a stochastic time-varying variable is considered for the modelling of economic time series. The focus of this paper is on the simultaneous estimation of parameters related to the stochastic processes of the mean...

We propose a new class of observation driven time series models referred to as Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS) models. The driving mechanism of the GAS model is the scaled score of the likelihood function. This approach provides a unified and consistent framework for introducing...

We investigate changes in the time series characteristics of postwar U.S. inflation. In a model-based analysis the conditional mean of inflation is specified by a long memory autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average process and the conditional variance is modelled by a stochastic...