Many postulated relations in finance imply that expected asset returns should monotonicallyincrease in a certain characteristic. To examine the validity of such a claim, onetypically considers a finite number of return categories, ordered according to the underlyingcharacteristic. A standard...

The Markowitz problem consists of finding in a financial market a self-financingtrading strategy whose final wealth has maximal mean and minimal variance. Westudy this in continuous time in a general semimartingale model and under coneconstraints: Trading strategies must take values in a...

The paper examines questions of local asymptotic stability of randomdynamical systems. Results concerning stochastic dynamics ingeneral metric spaces, as well as in Banach spaces, are obtained. Theresults pertaining to Banach spaces are based on the linearization ofthe systems under study. The...

Consider an investor trading dynamically to maximize expectedutility from terminal wealth. Our aim is to study the dependencebetween her risk aversion and the distribution of the optimal terminalpayo. Economic intuition suggests that high risk aversion leads to arather concentrated distribution,...

We develop a discrete-time stochastic volatility option pricing model, which exploits the informationcontained in high-frequency data. The Realized Volatility (RV) is used as a proxy of the unobservablelog-returns volatility. We model its dynamics by a simple but effective long-memory process:...

Limited liability creates a conict of interests between policyholders and shareholders ofinsurance companies. It provides shareholders with incentives to increase the risk of theinsurer's assets and liabilities which, in turn, might reduce the value policyholders attach toand premiums they are...

An equivalent !-martingale measure (E!MM) for a given stochastic process Sis a probability measure R equivalent to the original measure P such that S isan R-!-martingale. Existence of an E!MM is equivalent to a classical absenceof-arbitrage property of S, and is invariant if we replace the...

We solve the problem of mean-variance hedging for general semimartingale modelsvia stochastic control methods. After proving that the value process of theassociated stochastic control problem has a quadratic structure, we characteriseits three coefficient processes as solutions of semimartingale...

Our paper explores the role of time preferences on household debt maturity choice. Wefind that in countries where people are more patient in the long term, planning horizons in householddebt portfolios are significantly longer, as the optimal maturity of loans is considerably higher.The...

There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not.We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times,but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageursliquidity providers in normal times, namely their tolerance...