The 1990s were designated as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. Yet, almost ten years after the close of that decade, many issues remain unresolved about the nature of disasters and their impact on human beings, other life forms and the natural environment. There is the...

Much of the literature on the economics of mortgage markets has studied the FRM-ARM choice made by individual borrowers. However, to decide if the outcome of such a choice is efficient or approximately so, it is necessary to explore the question of optimal risk-sharing in mortgage contracts. But...

We study the impact of risky human capital in life-cycle portfolio choice and survey the academic literature on the optimal asset allocation over the individual's life-cycle. A distinction is made between the riskless conception of human capital as having bond-like characteristics, and the risky...

It is an undisputed fact that weather risk increases over time due to climate change. However, qualification of this statement with regard to the type of weather risk and geographical location is needed. We investigate the application of novel statistical tools for assessing changes in weather...

Classical asset allocation methods have assumed that the distribution of asset returns is smooth, well behaved with stable statistical moments over time. The distribution is assumed to have constant moments with e.g., Gaussian distribution that can be conveniently parameterised by the first two...

We study Aumann and Serrano's (2008) risk index for sums of gambles that are not dependent. If the dependent parts are similarly ordered, then the risk index of the sum is always larger than the minimum of the risk indices of the two gambles. For negative dependence, the risk index of the sum is...

This paper proposes a method to evaluate if risk is adequately accounted for in the Morningstar rating system. The analysis is based on the comparison between the rating obtained ignoring the risk component and those obtained increasing the weight of risk and, in particular, for the level of...

Probabilistic preference models predict that a subject makes different choices with different probabilities in repeatedly experiments with the same stimuli. This paper explains why. First, we prove that a gamble is a statistical ensemble or sample function of a random field with canonical...

We investigate the effect of including variance derivatives as calibration and hedging instruments for pricing and hedging exotic structures. This is studied empirically using market data for SPX and VIX derivatives applied in a stochastic volatility jump diffusion model

The paper is an empirical research work wherein the principle of Modern Portfolio Theory along with aspects of geographical diversification have been subjected to test. The validation of the said theory has been made via hypothesis testing in light of the financial market data. The paper has...