Using a Dynamic Semiparametric Factor Model (DSFM) we investigate the term structure of interest rates. The proposed methodology is applied to monthly interest rates for four southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain from the introduction of the Euro to the recent European...

Stochastic Volatility (SV) models are widely used in financial applications. To decide whether standard parametric restrictions are justified for a given dataset, a statistical test is required. In this paper, we develop such a test based on the linear state space representation. We provide a...

For over a decade, nonparametric modelling has been successfully applied to study nonlinear structures in financial time series. It is well known that the usual nonparametric models often have less than satisfactory performance when dealing with more than one lag. When the mean has an additive...

Motivated by a nonparametric GARCH model we consider nonparametric additive regression and autoregression models in the special case that the additive components are linked parametrically. We show that the parameter can be estimated with parametric rate and give the normal limit. Our procedure...

Forecasting based pricing of Weather Derivatives (WDs) is a new approach in valuation of contingent claims on nontradable underlyings. Standard techniques are based on historical weather data. Forward-looking information such as meteorological forecasts or the implied market price of risk (MPR)...

We propose a local adaptive multiplicative error model (MEM) accommodating timevarying parameters. MEM parameters are adaptively estimated based on a sequential testing procedure. A data-driven optimal length of local windows is selected, yielding adaptive forecasts at each point in time....

Predicting default probabilities is at the core of credit risk management and is becoming more and more important for banks in order to measure their client's degree of risk, and for firms to operate successfully. The SVM with evolutionary feature selection is applied to the CreditReform...

Values of tranche spreads of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are driven by the joint default performance of the assets in the collateral pool. The dependence between the names in the portfolio mainly depends on current economic conditions. Therefore, a correlation implied from tranches...

Source extraction and dimensionality reduction are important in analyzing high dimensional and complex financial time series that are neither Gaussian distributed nor stationary. Independent component analysis (ICA) method can be used to factorize the data into a linear combination of...

Financial risk control has always been challenging and becomes now an even harder problem as joint extreme events occur more frequently. For decision makers and government regulators, it is therefore important to obtain accurate information on the interdependency of risk factors. Given a...