The financial industry puts the Basle Committee under strain to align regulatory capital with economic capital. This could be reached by allowing more flexibility in the choice of risk measure for regulatory reporting. The authors show that if banks could use the theoretically more sound risk...

We examine the quantification of operational risk for banks. We adopt a financial economics approach and interpret operational risk management as a means of optimizing the profitability of an institution along its value chain. We start by defining operational risk and then propose a framework to...

Belief that a single number can capture the degree of risk being taken within a bank or an investment is mistaken - especially when that number is value at risk. Markus Leippold explains why the measure is flawed, points to the dangers of its widespread acceptance by regulators and investors,...

We identify and characterize a class of term structure models where bond yields are quadratic functions of the state vector. We label this class the quadratic class and aim to lay a solid theoretical foundation for its future empirical application. We consider asset pricing in general and...

To explore the rationality and competitiveness of the mutual fund industry, we analyze the alpha of active and index mutual funds from a global sample of more than 60,000 equity and fixed income funds and test the null hypothesis that alphas to investors are zero. We distinguish between...

The concept of second-order risk operationalizes the estimation risk in portfolio construction induced by model uncertainty. We study its contribution to the realized volatility of recently developed risk parity strategies. For each strategy, we derive closed-form solutions for the second-order...

We study the intra-horizon value at risk (iVaR) in a general jump diffusion setup and propose a new model of asset returns called displaced mixed-exponential model, which can arbitrarily closely approximate finite-activity jump-diffusions and completely monotone Levy processes. We derive...

Pursuing risk-based allocation across a universe of commodity assets, we find diversified risk parity (DRP) strategies to provide convincing results. DRP strives for maximum diversification along uncorrelated risk sources. A straightforward way to derive uncorrelated risk sources relies on...

This paper shows that the VIX market contains information that is not already contained by the S&P 500 market on the variance of the S&P 500 returns. We estimate a flexible affine model based on a joint time series of underlying indexes and option prices on both markets. We find that including...

We study the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the term structure of nominal interest rates. We develop a general equilibrium model, in which both the government and the central bank policy decisions are driven by uncertainty shocks. Our affine yield curve model captures both the shape of...