The thesis consists of two essays: "The CAPM -- A General Equilibrium Foundation" and "The Foreign Exchange Rate in Financial Markets".The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is one of the most successful models for portfolio selection. The utility functions are assumed to depend positively on...

The transmission of monetary and fiscal policies in an international context is one of the most prominent topics in the realm of international finance. In particular, researchers are interested in the effects of the respective policy on exchange rate movements, international price level...

In der vorliegenden Arbeit beschäftige ich mich mit der theoretischen Analyse von Geld- und Fiskalpolitik in Currency-Board-Systemen und der Währungsunion. Beide Währungssysteme haben seit den neunziger Jahren zunehmend an Bedeutung gewonnen, Currency Boards durch die Rückgewinnung der...

In this paper, we extend the debate concerning Credit Default Swap valuation to include time varying correlation and co-variances. Traditional multi-variate techniques treat the correlations between covariates as constant over time; however, this view is not supported by the data. Secondly, since...

The Great Moderation, the significant decline in the variability of economic activity, provides a most remarkable feature of the macroeconomic landscape in the last twenty years. A number of papers document the beginning of the Great Moderation in the US and the UK. In this paper, we use the...

This paper produces evidence in support of the existence of common risk factors in the US andUK interest rate swap markets. Using a multivariate smooth transition autoregression (STVAR)framework, we show that the dynamics of the US and UK swap spreads are best described by aregime-switching...

This work develops asymptotically optimal dividend policies to maximize the expected present value of dividends until ruin. Compound Poisson processes with regime switching are used to model the surplus and the switching (a continuous-time controlled Markov chain) represents random environment...

Nowadays, the regime switching model has become a popular model in mathematical finance and actuarial science. The market is not complete when the model has regime switching. Thus, pricing the regime switching risk is an important issue. In Naik (1993), a jump diffusion model with two regimes is...