We use a life cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice to study the effects of social security on the investment decisions of households for the European case. Our model is mainly based on the one developed by Cocco, Gomes, and Maenhout (2005). We extend it by unemployment risk using...

We study the optimal choice of quasi-likelihoods for nearly integrated,possibly non-normal, autoregressive models. It turns out that the two mostnatural candidate criteria, minimum Mean Squared Error (MSE) and maximumpower against the unit root null, give rise to different...

Contemporary financial stochastic programs typically involve a trade-offbetween 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...

In this paper, a new paradigm is developed for analyzinginvestment strategies and pricing financial assets. This paradigmassumes that any investment strategy has its own “inherent reward”and “inherent risk” that can be judged with common sense. Ijustify axiomatically the existence and...

We prove that the probability distribution of Hill's estimator can be betterapproximated by a series of appropriate gamma distributions than by the limitingnormal distribution.

Large data sets in finance with millions of observations have becomewidely available. Such data sets enable the construction of reliablesemi-parametric estimates of the risk associated with extreme pricemovements. Our approach is based on semi-parametric statisticalextreme value analysis, and...

Estimation using simulation techniques may be very time consuming. Specification tests for structuralstability often require more than one of such computationally demanding estimators. Typically one for thesample, one for the post-sample and one for the combination of sample and post-sample is...

We show that three convenient statistical properties that are known to hold forthe linear model with normal distributed errors that: (i.) when the variance is known, the likelihood based test statistics, Wald, Likelihood Ratio andScore or Lagrange Multiplier, coincide, (ii.) when the variance is...

This paper provides an extensive Monte-Carlo comparison of severalcontemporary cointegration tests. Apart from the familiar Gaussian basedtests of Johansen, we also consider tests based on non-Gaussianquasi-likelihoods. Moreover, we compare the performance of these parametrictests with tests...