This paper introduces the fundamentals of extreme value theory as well as practical aspects for estimating and assessing statistical models for tail-related risk measures.

Severe natural catastrophes in the early 1990s generated a lack of financial capacity in the catastrophe line of the global reinsurance market. The finance industry reacted to this situation by issuing innovative products designed to spread the excess risk more widely among international...

We investigate the performance of the threshold accepting heuristic for the index tracking problem. The index tracking problem consists in minimizing the tracking error between a portfolio and a benchmark. The objective is to replicate the performance of a given index upon the condition that the...

Many numerical methods to price options have been suggested in the finance literature. This paper aims at reviewing several numerical approaches in order to discuss their practical strenghts and/or weaknesses. The problem under investigation is a multivariate contingent claims model with three...

In this paper we investigate the performance of the threshold accepting heuristic for the index tracking problem. The index tracking problem consists in minimizing the tracking error between a portfolio and a benchmark. The objective is to replicate the performance of a given index upon the...

The paper first compares the use of optimization heuristics to the classical optimization techniques for the selection of optimal portfolios. Second, the heuristic approach is applied to problems other than those in the standard mean-variance framework where the classical optimization fails.