The final part of the consultation series on copula functions is devoted to the description of copula selection methods to choose the copula model that provides the best fit for the empirical data at hand, as well as to the description of copula evaluation methods by using goodness-of-fit tests.

A thorough review of twelve recent studies of production costs from different power generating technologies was conducted and a wide range in cost estimates was found. The reviewed studies show differences in their methodologies and assumptions, making the stated cost figures not directly...

The Deepwater Horizon incident demonstrated that most of the oil left is deep offshore or in other difficult to reach locations. Moreover, obtaining the oil remaining in currently producing reservoirs requires additional equipment and technology that comes at a higher price in both capital and...

A spatial model of voting in parliamentary elections is estimated by using survey data from The Netherlands, Great Brit-ain, and Israel. It is shown that more educated voters put more weight on the parties’ political programs. The choice of less educated voters depends primarily on their...

Considering the attention placed on SMEs in the new Basel Capital Accord, we propose a set of Bayesian and classical longitudinal models to predict SME default probability, taking unobservable firm and business sector heterogeneities as well as analysts’ recommendations into account. We...

This paper proposes dynamic copula and marginals functions to model the joint distribution of risk factor returns affecting portfolios profit and loss distribution over a specified holding period. By using copulas, we can separate the marginal distributions from the dependence structure and...

The effect on the estimation of the Value at Risk when dealing with multivariate portfolios when there is a misspecification both in the marginals and in the copulas is investigated. It is first shown that, when there is skewness in the data and symmetric marginals are used, the estimated...

This paper reviews the theory of Credit Default Swaps (CDS), the main characteristics of the CDS market, and how to estimate the non-default component of the yield spreads as the basis between the actual CDS premium and the hypothetical CDS premium implied by bond yields. We then analyze the...

We continue publishing the four-part consultation of professor of Moscow School of Economics of Lomonosov MSU Dean Fantazzini. The first part, that appeared in 2 (10), 2008 of the journal, dealt with the introduction to the problem (section one: basic concepts and types of financial risks,...

This article contains the second part of the consultation series on copula functions and their use in modeling multidimensional probability distributions. It describes pair-copula functions (including the concept of canonical and D-vines), alternative measures of dependence useful to summarize...