Currencies play an important role in facilitating trade and economic growth. Shifts in currency values may lead to economic dislocations hindering trade and growth. Most currencies are issued by government central banks. These central banks hold assets in the form of government debt and gold...

This paper develops a new approach to explain why risk factors constructed from option returns are priced in the stock market. We decompose an option- based factor into three main components and identify the one responsible for the beta-return relationship. Applying this method to the bear risk...

Optimal capacity allocation for investments in electricity generation assets can be deterministically derived by comparing technology specific long-term and short-term marginal costs. In an uncertain market environment, Mean-Variance Portfolio (MVP) theory provides a consistent framework to...

In this article we discuss welfare-optimal capacity allocation of different electricity generation technologies available for serving system demand. While the classical peak load pricing theory derives the efficient portfolio structure from a deterministic marginal production cost curve ("merit...

Investments in power generation assets are risky due to high construction costs and long asset lifetimes. Technology diversification in generation portfolios represents one option to reduce long-term investment risks for risk-averse decision makers. In this article, we analyze the impact of...

In principle, portfolio optimization in electricity markets can make use of the standard mean-variance model going back to Markowitz. Yet a key restriction in most electricity markets is the limited liquidity. Therefore the standard model has to be adapted to cope with limited liquidity. An...

In this paper we utilise the risk factors from both the finance and energy economics literatures to develop an improved asset pricing model (the Augmented-Four-Factor Model or AFFM) in the context of the European energy utility sector. In addition, we undertake inter-sectoral and inter-temporal...

This paper contributes to the debate on the effects of the financialization of commodity futures markets by studying the conditional volatility of long-short commodity portfolios and their conditional correlations with traditional assets (stocks and bonds). Using several groups of trading...

This paper studies the effects of financial speculation on commodity futures returns, using publicly available data from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, aggregated by trader groups. We exploit the heteroskedasticity in the weekly data to identify exogenous variation in speculators'...

Many electricity markets exhibit an oligopolistic structure with market participants whose individual trading activities may shift prices essentially. In this context, the question of how to optimally liquidate an existing electricity futures portfolio over a fixed time horizon under the...