The Integrated Energy and Climate Protection Program of the German government includes the political target of doubling the share of combined heat and power generation (CHP) in Germany from currently about 12% to 25% by 2020. In order to reach this goal, a new CHP law was enacted to improve the...

The 2008 financial crisis has spurred investors to wonder about adding tail risk hedges to their portfolios. However, the cost of these hedges can often be a deterrent. As a consequence, many financial institutions have tried to develop cost-effective products for investors who wished to protect...

Historical VaR, CVaR and ES (Expected Shortfall) to LIQUIDATION Software is a model characterized by its straightforwardness, allowing regulators measure risk using a standard database of primitive factors and portfolio positions only, leaving little error margin in comparing market risk for...

The Solvency II framework challenges insurers to evaluate and manage their embedded balance sheet risks appropriately. However, insurances hold balance sheet items, for which closed-form solutions and market prices are not available. Pure Monte Carlo valuation requires nested simulations, which...

We consider a capital at risk (CaR) minimization problem in an incomplete market Black-Scholes setting. The optimization problem is studied, given the possibility that a correlation constraint between the wealth process and a financial index is imposed. The optimal portfolio is not unique and it...

This paper proposes a novel scheme for achieving high investment performances with Mean-Variance (MV) portfolios. As is well-known, MV portfolio performances largely depend on the quality of estimates of parameters, namely expected returns and covariance matrices. Particularly, easily...

This paper proposes a novel test of zero pricing errors for the linear factor pricing model when the number of securities, N, can be large relative to the time dimension, T, of the return series. The test is based on Student t tests of individual securities and has a number of advantages over...

This paper analyses the fundamental drivers of risk and return in portfolios of private equity fund investments. We draw on a large data set of 771 mature European and North American primary buyout funds with historic performance information from Preqin covering vintages from 1998-2007. Using...

Institutional investment decisions are generally centered around mandates, where a manager's deviation from the benchmark is controlled by means of a tracking error volatility (TEV) constraint. This constraint is of absolute nature: once imposed, it should be honored irrespective of market...

Solvency II requires insurers to calculate the one-year Value at Risk (VaR) of their balance sheet. This involves the valuation of the balance sheet in one years time. As for insurance liabilities closed-form solutions to their value are generally not available, insurers turn to estimation...