We evaluate how non-normality of asset returns and the temporal evolution of volatility and higher moments affects the conditional allocation of wealth. We show that if one neglects these aspects, as would be the case in a mean-variance allocation, a significant cost would arise. The performance...

In this paper, we extend the concept of News Impact Curve developed by Engle and Ng (1993) to the higher moments of the multivariate returns' distribution, thereby providing a tool to investigate the impact of shocks on the characteristics of the subsequent distribution. For this purpose, we...

Recent portfolio choice, asset pricing, and option valuation models highlight the importance of skewness and kurtosis. Since skewness and kurtosis are related to extreme variations, they are also important for Value-at-Risk measurements. Our framework builds on a GARCH model with a conditional...

Designing an investment strategy in transition economies is a difficult task because stock-markets opened through time, time series are short, and there is little guidance how to obtain expected returns and covariance matrices necessary for mean-variance portfolio allocation. Also, structural...

For Central Banks, institutional, and individual investors it is crucial to understand the frequency and importance of drops or sudden rises in financial markets. Extreme value theory (evt) is an interesting tool providing answers to questions such as: <p> -with what frequency do we find variations...</p>

The entropy principle yields, for a given set of moments, a density that involves the smallest amount of prior information. We first show how entropy densities may be constructed in a numerically efficient way as the minimization of a potential. Next, for the case where the first four moments...

We develop a new methodology that measures conditional dependency. We achieve this by using copula functions that link marginal distributions, here chosen to obey a GARCH-type model with time-varying skewness and kurtosis. We apply this model to daily returns of stock-market indices. We find...

In this paper, we use a database consisting of daily stock-returns for 20 countries to test for similarities between the left and right tail of returns as well as for cross-sectional differences. To mitigate the issue of dependency between stock returns, we estimate the distribution of extremes...

We investigate the consequences for value-at-risk and expected shortfall purposes of using a GARCH filter on various mis-specified processes. In general, we find that the McNeil and Frey (2000) two step procedure has very good forecasting properties. Using an unconditional non filtered tail...

Starting in 1995, we follow for three years the 120 most important companies listed on the paris Bourse and examine the link between stock trading characteristics and different measures of earnings' surprises during annual and semi-annual public disclosures. After a short discussion of market...