In this paper we address the issue of modeling and forecasting electricity loads. We apply a two-step procedure to a series of system-wide loads from the California power market. First, we remove the weekly and annual seasonalities. Then, after analyzing properties of the deseasonalized data we...

We propose a simple model, based on Monte Carlo simulations, for studying the effects of changes in the environment on the adaptation and extinction of evolving species. We show that the geological data of climatic changes are well described by Levy-stable distributions. This leads, in our...

We analyze the implied volatility surface structure of ODAX options as traded on DTB (currently Eurex). We apply PCA to cross sections of the implied volatility surface taken along the same moneyness (m) or the same time to maturity (T). For data from the period October 3rd 1997 – November...

We examine convenience yields in the EU-wide CO2 emissions trading scheme (EU-ETS) during the first Kyoto commitment period (2008-2012). We find that the market has changed from initial backwardation to contango with significantly negative convenience yields in futures contracts. We further...

In this paper we investigate whether considering the fine structure of half-hourly electricity prices, the market closing prices of fundamentals (natural gas, coal and CO2) and the system-wide demand can lead to significantly more accurate short- and mid-term forecasts of APX UK baseload prices....

This paper is intended as a guide to building insurance risk (loss) models. A typical model for insurance risk, the so-called collective risk model, treats the aggregate loss as having a compound distribution with two main components: one characterizing the arrival of claims and another...

This paper is intended as a guide to building insurance risk (loss) models. A typical model for insurance risk, the so-called collective risk model, treats the aggregate loss as having a compound distribution with two main components: one characterizing the arrival of claims and another...

An important issue in fitting stochastic models to electricity spot prices is the estimation of a component to deal with trends and seasonality in the data. Unfortunately, estimation routines for the long-term and short-term seasonal pattern are usually quite sensitive to extreme observations,...