The recently finalized Basel II Capital Accord requires banks to adopt a procedure to estimate the operational risk capital charge. Under the Advanced Measurement Approaches, that are currently mandated for all large internationally active US banks, require the use of historic operational loss...

This paper develops a theoretical model that explains how long-term consumption goals influence households' choice of real assets in situations when these assets have no investment value. Using a suburban residential housing market that exemplifies such a market, we develop a general equilibrium...

"We develop a theoretical model of illiquidity, in which illiquid assets are being traded by two agents -- buyers and sellers. Illiquidity is defined as the expected time it takes a seller to sell his asset at the optimal price. The theoretical model is developed in the context of transactions...

Press articles in Germany that predicted a severe decline in property prices within certain regions caused by demographic developments have recently served to undermine the people's sense of security. This lead to an intense debate if and to what extent property price trends are affected by...

In the absence of appropriate comparable sales data property valuation literature suggests building up the capitalisation and/or discount rate starting from a risk free rate. In response to this need the basic purpose of this paper is to explore and explain actual returns in different property...

There appears to be a consensus that the recent instability in global financial markets may be attributable in part to the failure of financial modeling. More specifically, current risk models have failed to properly assess the risks associated with large adverse stock price behavior. In this...

Using four years of second-by-second executed trade data, we study the intraday effects of a representative group of scheduled economic releases on three exchange rates: EUR/$, JPY/$ and GBP/$. Using wavelets to analyze volatility behavior, we empirically show that intraday volatility clusters...

Recently, a body of academic literature has focused on the area of stable distributions and their application potential for improving our understanding of the risk of hedge funds. At the same time, research has sprung up that applies standard Bayesian methods to hedge fund evaluation. Little or...

We consider the sensitivity of conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) with respect to the tail index assuming regularly varying tails and exponential and faster-than-exponential tail decay for the return distribution. We compare it to the CVaR sensitivity with respect to the scale parameter for stable...

In the post-crisis era, financial institutions seem to be more aware of the risks posed by extreme events. Even though there are attempts to adapt methodologies drawing from the vast academic literature on the topic, there is also skepticism that fat-tailed models are needed. In this paper, we...