Many sophisticated investors rely on scenario analysis to select a portfolio. These investors define prospective economic scenarios, assign probabilities to them, translate the scenarios into expected asset class returns, and select the portfolio with the highest expected return or expected...

This article extends the variance ratio test of Lo and MacKinlay (1988) to tests of skewness and kurtosis ratios. The proposed tests are based on generalized methods of moments. In particular, overlapping observations are used and their dependencies (under the IID assumption) are explicitly...

We present a class of flexible and tractable static factor models for the term structure of joint default probabilities, the factor copula models. These high-dimensional models remain parsimonious with pair-copula constructions, and nest many standard models as special cases. The loss...

Investors typically measure an asset’s potential to diversify a portfolio by its correlations with the portfolio’s other assets, but correlation is useful only if it provides a good estimate of how an asset’s returns co-occur cumulatively with the other asset returns over the investor’s...

Many tax-codes around the world allow for special taxable treatment of savings in retirement accounts. In particular, profits in retirement accounts are usually tax exempt which allow investors to increase an asset's return by holding it in such a retirement account. While the existing...