See also the article 'Mean and bold: on separating merger economies from structural efficiency gains in the drinking water sector' 2010, <I>The Journal of the Operational Research Society</I>, 61, 222-34.<P> The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly,...</p></i>

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,...

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 thewillingness 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...

This paper proposes a new set of transformed polynomial functions that provide a flexible setting for nonlinear autoregressive modeling of the conditional mean while at the same time ensuring the strict stationarity, ergodicity, fading memory and existence of moments of the implied stochastic...

We value rating-triggered step-up bonds with three methods: (i) the Jarrow, Lando andTurnbull (1997, JLT) framework, (ii) a similar framework using historical probabilities and(iii) as plain vanilla bonds. We find that the market seems to value single step-up bondsaccording to the JLT model,...

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...

Although the main interest in the modelling of electricity prices is often on volatility aspects, we argue that stochastic heteroskedastic behaviour in prices can only be modelled correctly when the conditional mean of the time series is properly modelled. In this paper we consider different...

We consider eight different measures (issued amount, coupon, listed, age, missingprices, price volatility, number of contributors and yield dispersion) to approximate corporatebond liquidity and use a five-variable model to control for maturity, credit and currencydifferences between bonds. The...

This discussion paper led to a chapter in: (K.R. Schenk-Hoppe & T. Hens (Eds.,)) <I>Handbook of Financial Markets: Dynamics and Evolution</I>, Amsterdam:North Holland/Elsevier, 2009.<P> Traditional finance is built on the rationality paradigm. This chapter discusses simple models from an alternative...</p></i>