This special issue of the in North American Journal of Economics and Finance presents 24 papers by leading scholars in the field on “Recent Developments in Financial Economics and Econometrics”. The breadth of coverage is substantial, and includes original research and comprehensive review...

Risk management is crucial for optimal portfolio management. One of the fastest growing areas in empirical finance is the expansion of financial deriva-tives. The purpose of this special issue on “Risk Management and Financial Deriva-tives” is to highlight some areas in which novel...

The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation are substantially revised versions of the papers that were presented at the 2011 Madrid International Conference on “Risk Modeling and Management” (RMM2011). The papers cover the following topics: currency hedging...

Modelling, monitoring and forecasting volatility are indispensible to sensible portfolio risk management. The volatility of an asset of composite index can be traded by using volatility derivatives, such as volatility and variance swaps, options and futures. The most popular volatility index is...

This paper investigates whether the risk faced by rural farmers in Zimbabwe could poten- tially be managed by using community-based wildlife conservation. Community-based wildlife conservation could be an additional asset in the rural farmers’ investment portfolio thereby potentially...

This paper examines volatility and correlation dynamics in price returns of gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and explores the corresponding risk management implications for market risk and hedging. Value-at-Risk (VaR) is used to analyze the downside market risk associated with investments...

Empirical evidence suggests that people’s risk-perceptions are often systematically biased. This paper develops a simple framework to analyse public policy when this is the case. Expected utility (well-being) is shown to depend on both objective and subjective risks. The latter are important...

Much psychological evidence suggests that people’s risk-perceptions are biased. This paper assumes that public policy should intrinsically be concerned with people’s expected welfare, rather than their preferences, which sometimes implies a degree of paternalism. Still, expected welfare...

The country risk literature argues that country risk ratings have a direct impact on the cost of borrowings as they reflect the probability of debt default by a country. An improvement in country risk ratings, or country creditworthiness, will lower a country’s cost of borrowing and debt...