Beta-sorted portfolios - portfolios comprised of assets with similar covariation to selected risk factors - are a popular tool in empirical finance to analyze models of (conditional) expected returns. Despite their widespread use, little is known of their statistical properties in contrast to...

The relationship between risk and return is one of the most studied topics in finance. The majority of the literature is based on a linear, parametric relationship between expected returns and conditional volatility. This paper models the contemporaneous relationship between market excess...

We propose a new method to estimate the empirical pricing kernel based on option data. We estimate the pricing kernel nonparametrically by using the ratio of the risk-neutral density estimator and the subjective density estimator. The risk-neutral density is approximated by a weighted kernel...

This paper employs multivariate GARCH models with a BEKK specification to show significant shock and volatility spillovers from mature bond markets into select emerging Asian local currency bond markets. Results reveal that while the growth of individual bond markets in recent years has been...

This paper proposes computational framework for empirical estimation of Financial Agent-Based Models (FABMs) that does not rely upon restrictive theoretical assumptions. We customise a recent methodology of the Non-Parametric Simulated Maximum Likelihood Estimator (NPSMLE) based on kernel...

A primary goal in modelling the dynamics of implied volatility surfaces (IVS) aims at reducing complexity. For this purpose one fits the IVS each day and applies a principal component analysis using a functional norm. This approach, however, neglects the degenerated string structure of the...

The current European Debt Crisis has led to a reinforced effort to identify the sources of risk and their influence on yields of European Government Bonds. Until now, the potentially nonlinear influence and the theoretical need for interactions reflecting flighttoquality and flight-to-liquidity...

We investigate a model in which we connect slowly time varying unconditional long-run volatility with short-run conditional volatility whose representation is given as a semi-strong GARCH (1,1) process with heavy tailed errors. We focus on robust estimation of both long-run and short-run...

Individual players in a simultaneous equation binary choice model act differently in different environments in ways that are frequently not captured by observables and a simple additive random error. This paper proposes a random coefficient specification to capture this type of heterogeneity in...

Equity basket correlation is an important risk factor. It characterizes the strength of linear dependence between assets and thus measures the degree of portfolio diversification. It can be estimated both under the physical measure from return series, and under the risk neutral measure from...