The ANPEC exam has been an important instrument for the Brazilian academic economics since the 1970s. Nowadays, practically all graduate program in economics uses it as selection mechanism. This research has tabulated its microdata to produce a picture of what these numbers can reveal about...

In this paper, we consider the strategic asset allocation of an insurance company. This task can be seen as a special case of portfolio optimization. In the 1950s, Markowitz proposed to formulate portfolio optimization as a bicriteria optimization problem considering risk and return as...

For a continuous multi-objective optimization problem, it is usually not a practical approach to compute all its nondominated points because there are infinitely many of them. For this reason, a typical approach is to compute an approximation of the nondominated set. A common technique for this...

In a single-objective setting, nonconvex quadratic problems can equivalently be reformulated as convex problems over the cone of completely positive matrices. In small dimensions this cone equals the cone of matrices which are entrywise nonnegative and positive semidefinite, so the convex...

The problem of minimizing the difference of two convex functions is called polyhedral d.c. optimization problem if at least one of the two component functions is polyhedral. We characterize the existence of global optimal solutions of polyhedral d.c. optimization problems. This result is used to...

It is a challenging task to identify the objectives on which a certain decision was based, in particular if several, potentially conflicting criteria are equally important and a continuous set of optimal compromise decisions exists. This task can be understood as the inverse problem of...

An important aspect of optimization algorithms, for instance evolutionary algorithms, are termination criteria that measure the proximity of the found solution to the optimal solution set. A frequently used approach is the numerical verification of necessary optimality conditions such as the...

Accepting non-linearities as an endemic feature of financial data, this paper re-examines Cochrane"s "new fact in finance" hypothesis (Cochrane, Economic Perspectives-FRB of Chicago 23, 36–58, 1999). By implementing two methods, frequently encountered in digital signal processing analysis,...