In this paper we determine optimal trading strategies associated withthe financial variance and standard deviation principles of Schweizer (1997). These principles take into consideration the possibilities of hedging on the financial market and are derived by an indifference argument, which...

Recently, Diebold and Li (2003) obtained good forecasting results foryield curves in a reparametrized Nelson-Siegel framework. We analyze similarmodeling approaches for price curves of variance swaps that serve nowadaysas hedging instruments for options on realized variance. We consider the...

This paper investigates model risk issues in the context of mean-variance portfolio selection. We analytically and numerically show that, under model misspecification, the use of statistically robust estimates instead of the widely used classical sample mean and covariance is highly beneficial...

We study the asymptotic properties of a Tikhonov Regularized (TiR) estimator of a functional parameter based on a minimum distance principle for nonparametric conditional moment restrictions. The estimator is computationally tractable and takes a closed form in the linear case. We derive its...

Information ows across international financial markets typically occur within hours, making volatility spillover appear contemporaneous in daily data. Such simultaneous transmission of variances is featured by the stochastic volatility model developed in this paper, in contrast to usually...

This study explores the information content of HML and SMB by linking the Fama-French factors toshocks in the state variables which predict future investment opportunities. It shows that the HMLfactor contains information about shocks to default spread. Moreover, the Fama-French modelexplains...

We explore the pricing of variance risk by decomposing stocks' total variance into systematicand idiosyncratic return variances. While systematic variance risk exhibits a negative priceof risk, common shocks to the variances of idiosyncratic returns carry a large positive riskpremium. This...

It is well known that mean-variance portfolio selection is a time-inconsistent optimalcontrol problem in the sense that it does not satisfy Bellman’s optimalityprinciple and therefore the usual dynamic programming approach fails. We developa time-consistent formulation of this problem, which...

We derive an explicit formula of the Watts’ poverty index, in terms of parametersof bivariate lognormal distributions of price indices and nominal livingstandards. This result enables us to: analyse the contributions of the distributionsof prices and nominal living standards in poverty;...