Recently, Diebold and Li (2003) obtained good forecasting results foryield curves in a reparametrized Nelson-Siegel framework. We analyze similarmodeling approaches for price curves of variance swaps that serve nowadaysas hedging instruments for options on realized variance. We consider the...

The management of universities demands data on teaching and research performance. While teaching parameters can be measured via student performance and teacher evaluation programs, the connection of research outputs and their grant antecedents is much harder to check, test and understand. This...

In this master thesis a mechanism to test mononicity of empirical pricing kernels (EPK) is presented. By testing monotonicity of pricing kernel we can determine whether utility function is concave or not. Strictly decreasing pricing kernel corresponds to concave utility function while...