As a function of strike and time to maturity the implied volatility estimation is a challenging task in nancial econometrics. Dynamic Semiparametric Factor Models (DSFM) are a model class that allows for the estimation of the implied volatility surface (IVS) in a dynamic context, employing...

Option pricing models are calibrated to market data of plain vanillas by minimization of an error functional. From the economic viewpoint, there are several possibilities to measure the error between the market and the model. These different specifications of the error give rise to different...

Value-at-Risk (VaR) of a portfolio is determined by the multivariate distribution of the risk factors increments. This distribution can be modelled through copulae, where the copulae parameters are not necessarily constant over time. For an exchange rate portfolio, copulae with time varying...

A great proportion of stock dynamics can be explained using publicly available information. The relationship between dynamics and public information may be of nonlinear character. In this paper we offer an approach to stock picking by employing so-called decision trees and applying them to XETRA...

Trading, hedging and risk analysis of complex option portfolios depend on accurate pricing models. The modelling of implied volatilities (IV) plays an important role, since volatility is the crucial parameter in the Black-Scholes (BS) pricing formula. It is well known from empirical studies that...

Most dimension reduction methods based on nonparametric smoothing are highly sensitive to outliers and to data coming from heavy-tailed distributions. We show that the recently proposed methods by Xia et al. (2002) can be made robust in such a way that preserves all advantages of the original...

Market option prices in last 20 years conrmed deviations from the Black and Scholes (BS) models assumptions, especially on the BS implied volatility. Implied binomial trees (IBT) models capture the variations of the implied volatility known as \volatility smile". They provide a discrete...

E-learning plays an important role in education as it supports online education via computer networks and provides educational services by utilising information technologies. We present a case study describing the development of an Arabic language elearning course in statistics. Discussed are...

Information about risk preferences from investors is essential for modelling a wide range of quantitative finance applications. Valuable information related to preferences can be extracted from option prices through pricing kernels. In this paper, pricing kernels and their term structure are...

How can we measure and compare the relative performance of production units? If input and output variables are one dimensional, then the simplest way is to compute efficiency by calculating and comparing the ratio of output and input for each production unit. This idea is inappropriate though,...