Profit margins on endowment policies offered by European life insurers have been declining in recent years, due to a combination of low inflation and low bond yields. This is because these profit margins are a positive function of the gap between the risk-free rate and the minimum guaranteed...

In this paper we try to assess the impact of various policy changes on the ability of the insurance industry to preserve or increase the shareholders' value. As a proxy of the sensitivity of the shareholders value, we measure the sensitivity of ROE (Return On Equities) to three main variables...

This article analyzes the profitability of the banks in six European countries between 1994 and 1997. We deal with the link between profitability and certain external and interns' determinants of European banking system. Following a methodology of panel analysis with a fixed individual effects...

Long-range dependence in volatility is one of the most prominent examples of applications in financial market research involving universal power laws. Its characterization has recently spurred attempts at theoretical explanation of the underlying mechanism. This paper contributes to this recent...

We study the problem of finding sparse, mean reverting portfolios based on multivariate historical time series. After mapping the optimal portfolio selection problem into a generalized eigenvalue problem, we propose a new optimization approach based on the use of simulated annealing. This new...

This paper examines a popular stock message board and finds slight daily predictability using supervised learning algorithms when combining daily sentiment with historical price information. Additionally, with the profit potential in trading stocks, it is of no surprise that a number of popular...

The first of the Millennium Development Goals targets global poverty. The numbers that support this goal are estimated by the World Bank, and come from a worldwide count of people who live below a common international poverty line. This line, loosely referred to as the dollar-a-day line, is...

PPP-based national accounts have become an important part of the database for macroeconomists, development economists, and economic historians. Frequently used global data come from the Penn World Table (PWT) and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators; a substantial fraction of the...

PPP-based national accounts have become an important part of the database for macroeconomists, development economists, and economic historians. Frequently used global data come from the Penn World Table (PWT) and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators; a substantial fraction of the...