The primary purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the behavior of the elements of the foreign exchange market, the largest financial market in the world. Whilst the market itself is not new, the concept of currency as an alternative asset, is. Apart from growing awareness of the...

The objective of this paper is to determine how relative market and credit risk changes among European sectors during times of extreme market fluctuations. Ten sectors comprising the S&P Euro index are compared prior to and during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Market risk is measured using...

It is well documented that ‘‘unanticipated’’ information contained in United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) crop reports induces large price reactions in corn and soybean markets. Thus, a natural question that arises from this literature is: To what extent are futures hedges...

Agricultural cooperatives tend to be riskier than investor-oriented firms, both in a business and financial sense. However, cooperative managers are often reluctant to actively manage risk. Although the “risk management irrelevance proposition” suggests that cooperative managers should be...

In this paper we formulate a model for foreign exchange exposure management and (international) cash management taking into consideration random fluctuations of exchange rates. A vector error correction model (VECM) is used to predict the random behaviour of the forward as well as spot rates...

Economics

Portfolio optimization problems involving value at risk (VaR) are often computationally intractable and require complete information about the return distribution of the portfolio constituents, which is rarely available in practice. These difficulties are compounded when the portfolio contains...

This paper proposes a robust multivariate threshold vector autoregressive model with generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticities and dynamic conditional correlations to describe conditional mean, volatility and correlation asymmetries in financial markets. In addition, the...