In this paper a simulation approach for defaultable yield curves is developed within the Heath et al. (1992) framework. The default event is modelled using the Cox process where the stochastic intensity represents the credit spread. The forward credit spread volatility function is affected by...

The paper analyzes the simulated long-term behavior of well diversified portfolios in continuous financial markets. It focuses on the equi-weighted index and the market portfolio. The paper illustrates that the equally weighted portfolio constitutes a good proxy of the growth optimal portfolio,...

This paper examines international equity market co-movements using time-varying copulae. We examine distributions from the class of Symmetric Generalized Hyperbolic (SGH) distributions for modelling univariate marginals of equity index returns. We show based on the goodness-of-fit testing that...

Following the economic rationale of [10] and [11] we present a new class of lookback options (by first studying the canonical 'Russian' variant) where the holder enjoys the early exercise feature of American options where upon his payoff (deliverable immediately) is the 'best prediction' of the...

Legislation is an important output of the political process. Growth in legislation can serve as a proxy for growth in the size and role of government, side-stepping some of the endogeneity problems encountered in estimating relationships between government spending and revenue and national...

Estimation theory has shown, due to the limited estimation window available for real asset data, the sample based Markowitz mean-variance approach produces unreliable weights which fluctuate substantially over time. This paper proposes an alternate approach to portfolio optimization, being the...

This paper presents a class of defaultable term structure models within the HJM framework with stochastic volatility. Under certain volatility specifications, the model admits finite dimensional Markovian structures and consequently provides tractable solutions for interest rate derivatives. We...

Within a continuous-time framework, this paper proposes a stochastic heterogeneous agent model (HAM) of financial markets with time delays to unify various moving average rules used indiscrete-time HAMs. The time delay represents a memory length of a moving average rule indiscrete-time...

This paper analyses the relationship between the level of a return guarantee in an equity-linked pension scheme and the proportion of an investor's contribution needed to finance this guarantee. Three types of schemes are considered: investment guarantee, contribution guarantee and participation...