Var is perhaps the most commonly used measure of risk by financial institutions. At many of these the head of risk management gets a daily report on firm-wide Var as well disaggregated Var across the firm's businesses. Often chief risk manager (CRM) is a top level officer in many financial...

We present the first step in a program to develop a comprehensive, unified equilibrium theory of asset and liability pricing. We give a mathematical framework for pricing insurance products in a multiperiod financial market. This framework reflects classical economic principles (like utility...

Modern portfolio theory produces optimal portfolios from estimates of expected returns and a covariance matrix. Such optimal portfolios are efficient portfolios, that is they provide the maximum level of expected return for a given level of risk. We present a method for portfolio selection based...

Aumann and Serrano (2008) introduce the index of riskiness to quantify the risk of a gamble. We discuss for which gambles this index of riskiness exists by considering the acceptance behavior of CARA-agents. Since for several relevant distributions riskiness is not defined, we suggest an...

An information transaction entails the purchase of information. Formally, it consists of an information structure together with a price. We develop an index of the appeal of information transactions, which is derived as a dual to the agent’s preferences for information. The index of...

This paper prepared for the Handbook of Statistics (Vol.14: "Statistical Methods in Finance"), surveys the subject of stochastic volatility. the following subjects are covered: volatility in financial markets (instantaneous volatility of asset returns, implied volatilities in option prices and...

The Markowitz mean-variance optimizing framework has served as the basis for modern portfolio theory for more than 50 years. However, efforts to translate this theoretical foundation into a viable portfolio construction algorithm have been plagued by technical difficulties stemming from the...

A residual-income model, named Systemic Value Added (SVA), is proposed for decision-making purposes, based on a systemic approach introduced in Magni (2000, 2003, 2004). The model translates the notion of residual income (excess profit) giving formal expression to a counterfactual alternative...

The problem of decomposing a cash flow has been treated in recent years by Gronchi (1986, 1987), Peccati (1987, 1991, 1992), Stewart (1991), Pressacco and Stucchi (1997). After showing that the Economic Value Added introduced by Stewart bears a strong resemblance to (and in some conditions...

The aim of this paper is to develop a hedging methodology for making a portfolio of options delta, vega and gamma neutral by taking positions in other available options, and simultaneously minimizing the net premium to be paid for the hedging. A quadratic programming solution for the problem is...