Many of the concepts in theoretical and empirical finance developed over the past decades - including the classical portfolio theory, the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model or the RiskMetrics variance-covariance approach to VaR - rest upon the assumption that asset returns follow a normal...

Understanding the dynamics of high dimensional non-normal dependency structure is a challenging task. This research aims at attacking this problem by building up a hidden Markov model (HMM) for Hierarchical Archimedean Copulae (HAC), where the HAC represent a wide class of models for high...

This chapter deals with the estimation of risk neutral distributions for pricing index options resulting from the hypothesis of the risk neutral valuation principle. After justifying this hypothesis, we shall focus on parametric estimation methods for the risk neutral density functions...

This paper proposes a decomposition of the composition effect, i.e. the part of the observed between-group difference in the distribution of some economic outcome that can be explained by differences in the distribution of covariates. Our decomposition contains three types of components: (i) the...

In this paper, I derive and implement a nonparametric, arbitrage-free technique for multivariate contingent claim (MVCC) pricing. Using results from the method of copulas, I show that the multivariate risk-neutral density can be written as a product of marginal risk-neutral densities and a...

In this paper nonparametric instrumental variable estimation of local average treatment effects (LATE) is extended to incorporate confounding covariates. Estimation of local average treatment effects is appealing since their identification relies on much weaker assumptions than the...

Propensity score matching is widely used in treatment evaluation to estimate average treatment effects. Nevertheless, the role of the propensity score is still controversial. Since the propensity score is usually unknown and has to be estimated, the efficiency loss arising from not knowing the...

Values of tranche spreads of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are driven by the joint default performance of the assets in the collateral pool. The dependence between the names in the portfolio mainly depends on current economic conditions. Therefore, a correlation implied from tranches...

In the paper we research statistical properties of the Central European stock markets. We focus mainly on the tail behavior of the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian stock markets and compare them to the benchmark U.S. and German stock markets. We fit the data of the 4-year period from March 2005 to...

In this paper we study the finite sample behavior of the Hill estimator under α-stable distributions. Using large Monte Carlo simulations we show that the Hill estimator overestimates the true tail exponent and can hardly be used on samples with small length. Utilizing our results, we introduce...