If the Black-Scholes model and its extensions were the discoveries of the 70s and 80s, then Value-at-risk (VaR) models are the darlings of the 90s. These models have many uses within an organisation; for example, a risk manager may use VaR to allocate trading limits, senior management for asset...

This paper uses clinical evidence to show how the German system of corporate control and governance is both more active and more hostile than has previously been suggested. It provides a complete breakdown of ownership and takeover defence patterns in German listed companies and finds highly...

We analyze exchange-rate management by the central bank when it makes the FX market for the sake of social-welfare objectives. It is assumed that markets are incomplete, so that agents are exposed to exchange-rate volatility against which they cannot fully hedge. It follows that the central bank...

In the framework of general semimartingale models we provide limit theorems for variational sums including the p-th power variation, i.e. the sum of p-th absolute powers of increments of a process. This gives new insight in the use of quadratic and realised power variation as an estimate for the...

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the aggregate international demand schedule for emerging market (EM) securities as an asset class. The standard ‘push-pull’ model of capital flows is modified by reference to recent work on portfolio choice in the context of credit...

We consider kernel-based estimators of integrated variances in the presence of independent market microstructure effects. We derive the bias and variance properties for all regular kernel-based estimators and derive a lower bound for their asymptotic variance. Further we show that the...

Financial conglomerates combine banking, insurance and other financial services within a single corporation. In this non-technical paper I consider the rationale for capital regulation in such firms and I examine some current policy questions in the light of this discussion. My first conclusion...

This paper studies in some detail a class of high frequency based volatility (HEAVY) models. These models are direct models of daily asset return volatility based on realized measures constructed from high frequency data. Our analysis identifies that the models have momentum and mean reversion...

In this paper we consider the problem of hedging options in the presence of costs in trading the underlying asset. This work is an asymptotic analysis of a stochastic control problem, as in Hodges & Neuberger (1989) and Davis, Panas & Zariphopoulou (1993) . We derive a simple expression for the...

In this paper we provide an asymptotic distribution theory for some non-parametric tests of the hypothesis that asset prices have continuous sample paths. We study the behaviour of the tests using simulated data and see that certain versions of the tests have good finite sample behaviour. We...