Power-law tail behavior and the summation scheme of Levy-stable distributions is the basis for their frequent use as models when fat tails above a Gaussian distribution are observed. However, recent studies suggest that financial asset returns exhibit tail exponents well above the Levy-stable...

In this paper, we present a procedure for consistent estimation of the severity and frequency distributions based on incomplete insurance data and demonstrate that ignoring the thresholds leads to a serious underestimation of the ruin probabilities. The event frequency is modelled with a...

The Conditionally Exponential Decay (CED) model is used to explain the scaling laws observed in financial data. This approach enables us to identify the distributions of currency exchange rate or economic indices returns (changes) corresponding to the empirical scaling laws. This is illustrated...

We discuss the origins and the possible reasons for the sudden death of the VOLAX contract.

Property Claim Services (PCS) provides indices for losses resulting from catastrophic events in the US. In this paper we study these indices and take a closer look at distributions underlying insurance claims. Surprisingly, the lognormal distribution seems to give a better fit than the Paretian...

In this paper, we discuss the issue of estimation of the parameters of stable laws. We present an overview of the known methods and compare them on samples of different sizes and for different values of the parameters. Performance tables are provided.

We use the Conditionally Exponential Decay (CED) model to explain the scaling behavior in currency exchange (FX) rates. This approach enables us not only to show that FX returns satisfy scaling with an exponent qualitatively different from that of a random walk, but also to identify the...

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...