The strategic importance of rare earth elements (REEs) has become increasingly important because of their relative scarcity and worldwide increasing demand, as well as China’s quasi-monopoly of this market. REEs are virtually not substitutable, and they are essential for a variety of...

As correlations of asset returns increased and diversification effects vanished during the financial crisis, the search for new and potentially uncorrelated asset classes gains importance. As a result, several asset classes have been analyzed by academics in order to determine their...

Ameriks, Caplin, Leahy & Tyler (2007) study how lack of self-control may lead to overconsumption and low wealth accumulation. For their analysis, the authors calculate difference scores from their survey questions. We review their study and highlight potential issues in the use of difference...

Republished as CIE Working Paper 2015-02

In this Article we have analysed the implications for portfolio optimisation of returns on investment not distributed normally. We have focused our activities on analysing higher moments of distribution of returns and, in particular, on lopsidedness as the third moment of distribution. So, the...

Price movements in many commodity markets exhibit significant seasonal patterns. In this paper, we study the effects of seasonal volatility on models’ option pricing performance. In terms of options pricing, a deterministic seasonal component at the price level can be neglected. In contrast,...

Many commodity markets contain a strong seasonal component in volatility. In this paper, the importance of this seasonal behavior for the pricing of commodity options is analyzed. We propose a stochastic volatility model where the drift term of the variance process captures the observed seasonal...

In this paper, we evaluate growth stocks by modeling a company´ s customer equity. We start with the observation that the number of customers in successful start-ups increases very quickly (exponentially) in the first few years. Then the customer base converges towards an industry average. On...