Factor modeling is a popular strategy to induce sparsity in multivariate models as they scale to higher dimensions. We develop Bayesian inference for a recently proposed latent factor copula model, which utilizes a pair copula construction to couple the variables with the latent factor. We use...

Forecasting temperature in time and space is an important precondition for both the design of weather derivatives and the assessment of the hedging effectiveness of index based weather insurance. In this article, we show how this task can be accomplished by means of Kriging techniques. Moreover,...

This paper describes the modelling of spread risk, in case of missing or illiquid market data, by using a subset of good quality liquid bond/credit default swap (CDS) spread time series. The proposed method links copula simulation to the actual historical spread dynamics. This is important when...

Understanding how defaults correlate across firms is a persistent concern in risk management. In this paper, we apply covariate-dependent copula models to assess the dynamic nature of credit risk dependence, which we define as "credit risk clustering". We also study the driving forces of the...

An asset pricing model is customarily evaluated by how well it explains means of returns. But how well the model explains fluctuations of returns is similarly important though often overlooked in the literature. We derive “efficient” factors that combine both objectives and turn out to...

It is well known that Markowitz Portfolio Optimization often leads to unreasonable and unbalanced portfolios that are optimal in-sample but perform very poorly out-of-sample. There is a strong relationship between these poor returns and the fact that covariance matrices that are used within the...

In the current literature uncertainty about the future course of the economy is identified as a possible driver of business cycle fluctuations. In fact, uncertainty surrounds the movements of all economic variables which gives rise to a monitoring problem. We identify the different dimensions of...