Portfolio sorting is ubiquitous in the empirical finance literature, where it has been widely used to identify pricing anomalies in different asset classes. Despite the popularity of portfolio sorting, little attention has been paid to the statistical properties of the procedure or to the...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

We consider multiple regression (MR) model averaging using the Focused Information Criterion (FIC). Our approach is motivated by the problem of implementing a mean-variance portfolio choice rule. The usual approach is to estimate parameters ignoring the intention to use them in portfolio choice....

Variable annuities are insurance products that contain guarantees and using the Monte Carlo method to calculate the fair market values of these guarantees for a large portfolio of such products is extremely time consuming. In this paper, we propose the class of GB2 distributions to model the...