We present an easily implemented, fast, and accurate method for approximating extreme quantiles of compound loss distributions (frequency and severity) as are commonly used in insurance and operational risk capital models. The Interpolated Single Loss Approximation (ISLA) of Opdyke (2014) is...

This thesis consists of four self-contained papers related to banking, credit markets and financial stability. Paper [I] presents a credit market model and finds, using an agent based modeling approach, that credit crunches have a tendency to occur; even when credit markets are almost entirely...

According to the last proposals of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, banks under the Advanced Measurement Approach (AMA) must use four different sources of information to assess their Operational Risk capital requirement. The fourth including "business environment and internal control...

This study aims to describe the size distribution of Portuguese firms, as measured by annual sales and total assets, between 2006 and 2012, giving an economic interpretation for the evolution of the distribution along the time. Three distributions are fitted to data: the lognormal, the Pareto...

Parameter uncertainty has been a recurrent subject treated in the financial literature. The normative portfolio selection approach considers two main kinds of decision rules: expected expected utility maximization and mean-variance criterion. Assuming that the mean-variance criterion is a good...

This paper analyzes the higher-order properties of nested pseudo-likelihood (NPL) estimators and their practical implementation for parametric discrete Markov decision models in which the probability distribution is defined as a fixed point. We propose a new NPL estimator that can achieve...

Quantiles play an important role in modelling quality of service in the service industry and in modelling risk in the financial industry. Recently, Hong showed in his breakthrough papers that efficient simulation based estimators can be obtained for quantile sensitivities by means of sample path...

The problem of instrument proliferation and its consequences (overfitting of endogenous variables, bias of estimates, weakening of Sargan/Hansen test) are well known. The literature provides little guidance on how many instruments is too many. It is common practice to report the instrument count...

The problem of instrument proliferation and its consequences (overfitting of the endogenous explanatory variables, biased IV and GMM estimators, weakening of the power of the overidentification tests) are well known. This paper introduces a statistical method to reduce the instrument count. The...

We present a fast and accurate computational method for solving and estimating a class of dynamic programming models with discrete and continuous choice variables. The solution method we develop for structural estimation extends the en- dogenous grid-point method (EGM) to discrete-continuous...