We make all decisions in the context of what we know and can envision. However, catastrophes often arise from what we had not known or had not envisioned previously. Approaches that work for addressing what can be envisioned are not useful in preventing catastrophic meltdowns arising from what...

Risk diversification is the basis of insurance and investment. It is thus crucial to study the effects that could limit it. One of them is the existence of systemic risk that affects all of the policies at the same time. We introduce here a probabilistic approach to examine the consequences of...

Medical expenditure risk can pose a major threat to living standards. We derive decomposable measures of catastrophic medical expenditure risk from reference-dependent utility with loss aversion. We propose a quantile regression based method of estimating risk exposure from cross-section data...

Deviations from normality in financial return series have led to the development of alternative portfolio selection models. One such model is the downside risk model, whereby the investor maximizes his return given a downside risk constraint. In this paper we empirically observe the...

This study develops a novel 2-step hedonic approach, which is used to construct a price index for German paintings. This approach enables the researcher to use every single auction record, instead of only those auction records that belong to a sub-sample of selected artists. This results in a...

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

This paper features an analysis of the effectiveness of a range of portfolio diversification strategies, with a focus on down-side risk metrics, as a portfolio diversification strategy in a European market context. We apply these measures to a set of daily arithmetically compounded returns on a...

Empirical evidence suggests that asset returns correlate more strongly in bear markets than conventional correlation estimates imply. We propose a method for determining complete tail-correlation matrices based on Value-at-Risk (VaR) estimates. We demonstrate how to obtain more effi cient...

Actual portfolios contain fewer stocks than are implied by standard financial analysis that balances the costs of diversification against the benefits in terms of the standard deviation of the returns. Suppose a safety first investor cares about downside risk and recognizes the heavytail feature...

This paper characterizes the optimal first-price auction (FPA) and second-price auction (SPA) for selling rights, contracts, or licenses that involve ensuing payoff uncertainty for the winning bidder. The distribution of the random payoff is common knowledge, except that bidders have private...