A general model is proposed for flexibly estimating the density of a continuous response variable conditional on a possibly high-dimensional set of covariates. The model is a finite mixture of asymmetric student-t densities with covariate dependent mixture weights. The four parameters of the...

This paper studies the effects of heterogeneity in planning propensity on wealth inequality and asset prices. I consider an economy populated by attentive and inattentive agents. Attentive agents plan their consumption period by period, while inattentive agents plan every other period....

Accurate prediction of the frequency of extreme events is of primary importance in many financialapplications such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) analysis. We propose a semi-parametric method for VaRevaluation. The largest risks are modelled parametrically, while smaller risks are captured by the...

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different,possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patternssimultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decisionmaking. In this paper we present a simple...

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...

We consider a stochastic volatility model of the mean-reverting type to describe the evolution of a firm’s values instead of the classical approach by Merton with geometric Brownian motions. We develop an analytical expression for the default probability. Our simulation results indicate that...

There are various parametric models to analyse the volatility in time series of financial market data. For maximum likelihood estimation these parametric methods require the assumption of a known conditional distribution. In this paper we examine the conditional distribution of daily DAX returns...

This paper reexamines the Equity Premium Puzzle for the German stock market with control for inflation and taxation. Two methods for relaxing the assumption of aggregate consumption being equal to aggregate dividends are compared: the leverage approach and the usage of a bivariate stochastic...

The paper provides a baseline model for regulatory analysis of systemic liquidity shocks. We show that banks may have an incentive to invest excessively in illiquid long term projects. In the prevailing mixed strategy equilibrium the allocation is inferior from the investor’s point of view...

Most of the empirical applications of the stochatic volatility (SV) model are based on the assumption that the conditional distribution of returns given the latent volatility process is normal. In this paper the SV model based on a conditional normal distribution is compa-red with SV...