The current subprime crisis has prompted us to look again into the nature of risk at the tail of the distribution. In particular, we investigate the risk contribution of an asset, which has infrequent but huge losses, to a portfolio using two risk measures, namely Value-at-Risk (VaR) and...

This paper focuses on two methods for optimum portfolio selection. We compare Mean-Variance method with Mean-VaR method by the means of investment simulation, based on Czech financial market data from turbulent market periods of the year 2007 and the year 2008. We compare both strategies, basing...

We characterize the investor’s optimal portfolio allocation subject to a budget constraint and a probabilistic VaR constraint in complete markets environments with a finite number of states. The set of feasible portfolios might no longer be connected or convex, while the number of local optima...

Contrary to static mean-variance analysis, very few papers have dealt with dynamic mean-variance analysis. Here, the mean-variance efficient self-financing portfolio strategy is derived for n risky assets in discrete and continuous time. In the discrete setting, the resulting portfolio is...

Growing experimental evidence suggests that loss aversion plays an important role in asset allocation decisions. We study the asset allocation of a linear loss-averse (LA) investor and compare the optimal LA portfolio to the more traditional optimal mean-variance (MV) and conditional...

The objective of this paper is to combine a real options framework with portfolio optimization techniques and to apply this new framework to investments in the electricity sector. In particular, a real options model is used to assess the adoption decision of particular technologies under...

Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the unpriced risk of individual securities. In this article we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case of fat-tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a...

Regulators often set value-at-risk (VaR) constraints to limit the portfolio risk of institutional investors. For some investors, notably pension funds, the VaR constraint is enforced over a horizon which is significantly shorter than the investment horizon of the investor. Our paper aims to...