It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...

I compute economic gains for a power utility investor from taking business cycle dependent return predictability into account. Recent studies show that stock returns are only predictable in recessions, and bond returns are only predictable in expansions. I examine whether this finding can be...

This paper extends the project initiated in and studies a lifecycle portfolio choice problem with borrowing constraints and finite retirement time in which an agent receives labor income that adjusts to financial market shocks in a path dependent way. The novelty here, with respect to, is the...

We present a robust version of the life-cycle optimal portfolio choice problem in the presence of labor income, as introduced in Biffis, Gozzi and Prosdocimi and Dybvig and Liu. In particular, in the influence of past wages on the future ones is modelled linearly in the evolution equation of...

Risk management technology applied to high dimensional portfolios needs simple and fast methods for calculation of Value-at-Risk (VaR). The multivariate normal framework provides a simple off-the-shelf methodology but lacks the heavy tailed distributional properties that are observed in data. A...

This paper proposes a novel approach to the combination of conditional covariance matrix forecasts based on the use of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). It is shown how the procedure can be generalized to deal with large dimensional systems by means of a two-step strategy. The finite...

This paper investigates the limit properties of mean-variance (mv) and arbitrage pricing (ap) trading strategies using a general dynamic factor model, as the number of assets diverge to infinity. It extends the results obtained in the literature for the exact pricing case to two other cases of...

We examine the impact of temporal and portfolio aggregation on the quality of Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts over a horizon of ten trading days for a well-diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds and alternative investments. The VaR forecasts are constructed based on daily, weekly or biweekly...

Predictions of asset returns and volatilities are heavily discussed and analyzed in the finance research literature. In this paper, we compare linear and nonlinear predictions for stock- and bond index returns and their covariance matrix. We show in-sample and out-of-sample prediction accuracy...

Our research project analyses the suitability of social responsible investments (SRI) and alternative asset classes (in particular commodities, hedge fund in-vestments, high-yield bonds) for the portfolio management of German Pension Insurance Funds (Pensionskassen), the largest external...