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...

An important issue in fitting stochastic models to electricity spot prices is the estimation of a component to deal with trends and seasonality in the data. Unfortunately, estimation routines for the long-term and short-term seasonal pattern are usually quite sensitive to extreme observations,...

In this comprehensive empirical study we critically evaluate the use of forecast averaging in the context of electricity prices. We apply seven averaging and one selection scheme and perform a backtesting analysis on day-ahead electricity prices in three major European and US markets. Our...

In this paper we analyze the short-term spot price behavior of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission allowances of the new EU-wide CO2 emissions trading system (EU ETS). After reviewing the stylized facts of this new class of assets we investigate several approaches for modeling the returns of emission...

The renewable energy sector has accomplished remarkable growth rates over the last decade. This paper examines the dynamics of excess returns for the WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index, which lists firms in the renewable energy sector and is used as a global benchmark. We propose a...

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...