Yield curves are used to imply the forward rates and discount factors from market tradable instruments and are required to discount future cash flows and evaluate the price of all financial contracts. Not all instruments can be included in the yield curve calibration or fitting process, hence we...

This study introduces a non linear model of commodity futures prices which accounts for the pressures due to hedging and speculative activities. The interaction with the corresponding spot market is considered assuming that a long term equilibrium relationship holds between futures and spot...

Popular yield curve models include affine term structure models. These models are usually based on a fixed set of parameters which is calibrated to the actual financial market conditions. Under changing market conditions also parametrization changes. We discuss how parameters need to be updated...

We propose a dividend stock valuation model where multiple dividend growth series and their dependencies are modelled using a multivariate Markov chain. Our model advances existing Markov chain stock models. First, we determine assumptions that guarantee the finiteness of the price and risk as...

We present conditions under which positive alpha exists in the realm of active portfolio management - in contrast to the controversial result in (Jarrow (2010) which implicates delegated portfolio management by surmising that positive alphas are illusionary. Specifically, we show that the...

We perform various experiments correlating past changes of social indicators about a country with future stock market returns for that country. The 169 social indicators we use, which go back as far as the year 1900, are available from the Varieties of Democracy Project. We use two sets of data...

Responses of asset returns to indices introduce kurtosis in portfolio returns. Preoccupation with ‘tail-risk' entails modeling portfolio exposure to second and fourth moment deviations around the mean return. For quadratic utility optimizers, kurtosis aversion could be viewed as either...

This paper considers the valuation of equity-linked life insurance contracts that offer an annually guaranteed minimum return. The policy premiums are invested in a reference portfolio that is modeled by means of a regime switching Lévy process where the model parameters depend on a continuous,...

We quantify crash risk in currency returns. To accomplish this task, we develop and estimate an empirical model of exchange rate dynamics using daily data for four currencies relative to the US dollar: the Australian dollar, the British pound, the Swiss franc, and the Japanese yen. The model...

We study optimal hedging design for returns on an Italian equity mutual fund index since 2008. Alternative hedging instruments include one-month futures contracts for FTSE-MIB, FTSE100 and Xetra DAX. We use bivariate models of our Italian equity mutual fund index and each hedging instrument to...