Recent portfolio choice asset pricing and option valuation models highlight the importance of skewness and kurtosis. Since skewness and kurtosis are related to extreme variations they are also important for Value-at-Risk measurements. Our framework builds on a GARCH model with a condi-tional...

The entropy principle yields, for a given set of moments, a density that involves the smallest amount of prior information,. We first show how entropy densities may be constructed in a numerically efficient way as the minimization of a potential. Next, for the case where the first four moments...

We develop a new methodology that measures conditional dependency. We achieve this by using copula functions that link marginal distributions, here chosen to obey a GARCH-type model with time-varying skewness and kurtosis. We apply this model to daily returns of stock-market indices. We find...

Designing an investment strategy in transition economies is a difficult task, because stock markets opened through time, time series are short, and there is little guidance how to obtain expected returns and covariance matrices necessary for mean-variance asset allocation. Moments of market...

In this paper, we investigate the performance-growth relation of French mutual funds. Using panel techniques, we find that capital inflows to French past top performing funds are not as strong as expected. This result suggests that there exist barriers to investment, that may come from the fact...

We evaluate how departure from normality may affect the allocation of assets. A Taylor series expansion of the expected utility allows to focus on certain moments and to compute numerically the optimal portfolio allocation. A decisive advantage of this approach is that it remains operational...

The Gram-Charlier expansion, where skewness and kurtosis directly appear as parameters, has become popular in Finance as a generalization of the normal density. We show how positivity constraints can be numerically implemented, thereby guaranteeing that the expansion defines a density. The...

We evaluate how non-normality of asset returns and the temporal evolution of volatility and higher moments affects the conditional allocation of wealth. We show that if one neglects these aspects, as would be the case in a mean-variance allocation, a significant cost would arise. The performance...

We evaluate how departure from normality may affect the allocation of assets. A Taylor series expansion of the expected utility allows to focus on certain moments and to compute numerically the optimal portfolio allocation. A decisive advantage of this approach is that it remains operational...

We evaluate how departure from normality may affect the conditional allocation of wealth. The expected utility function is approximated by a fourth-order Taylor expansion that allows for non-normal returns. Market returns are characterized by a joint model that captures the time dependency and...