We evaluate how departure from normality may affect the allocation of assets. A Taylor series expansion of the expected utility allows to focus on certain moments and to compute numerically the optimal portfolio allocation. A decisive advantage of this approach is that it remains operational...

In this paper, we investigate the performance-growth relation of French mutual funds. Using panel techniques, we find that capital inflows to French past top performing funds are not as strong as expected. This result suggests that there exist barriers to investment, that may come from the fact...

Designing an investment strategy in transition economies is a difficult task, because stock markets opened through time, time series are short, and there is little guidance how to obtain expected returns and covariance matrices necessary for mean-variance asset allocation. Moments of market...

The entropy principle yields, for a given set moments, a density that involves the smallest amount of prior information. We first show how entropy densities may be constructed in a numerically efficient way as the minimization of a potential. Next, for the case where the first four moments are...

In this study we compare the quality and information content of risk neutral densities obtained by various methods. We consider a non-parametric method based on a mixture of log-normal densities, the semi-parametric ones based on an Hermite approximation of Madan and Milne, or based on an...

The aim of this paper is to compare various methods which extract a Risk Neutral Density (RND) out of PIBOR as well as of Notional interest rate futures options and to investigate how traders reacted to a political event. We first focus on 5 dates surrounding the 1997 snap election and several...

The Gram-Charlier expansion, where skewness and kurtosi directly appear as parameters, has become popular in Finance as a generalization of the normal density. We show how positivity constraints can be numerically implemented, thereby guaranteeing that the expansion defines a density. The...

Recent portfolio choice asset pricing and option valuation models highlight the importance of skewness and kurtosis. Since skewness and kurtosis are related to extreme variations they are also important for Value-at-Risk measurements. Our framework builds on a GARCH model with a condi-tional...

We develop a new methodology that measures conditional dependency. We achieve this by using copula functions that link marginal distributions, here chosen to obey a GARCH-type model with time-varying skewness and kurtosis. We apply this model to daily returns of stock-market indices. We find...

In the following paper the authors start with a review of theoretical elements of extreme value theory (evt). In the empirical section of this study they consider five mature markets, nine Asian, six Eastern European, and seven Latin American emerging markets. The tail-behavior of returns is...